Abstract Nonlinear optical effect such as saturable absorption (SA) and reverse saturable absorption (RSA) play a key role for all-optical logic gates, in which transition between them is a challenging issue for the optoelectronic applications. Herein, we find MoTe2 nano-films fabricated with liquid-phase exfoliation and a vacuum filtration method which demonstrate both SA and RSA with different thicknesses and pump intensity. The SA nonlinear optical susceptibility for thick film (100 nm) is Imχ(3) ∼ 10−11 esu. However, the thin film (30 nm) exhibited RSA with the Imχ(3) as high as ∼9.96 × 10−11 esu. The different nonlinear optical response with the thickness is due to the interlayer coupling effect. Under high pump intensity, the thick MoTe2 film also demonstrates transition from SA to RSA. The four energy-level model is employed to analyze the competition between the ground-state and excited-state absorption. We found that the conversion of SA to RSA depends not only on pump intensity but also on the absorption cross-section and transition probability between energy level. The transition properties of SA and RSA for MoTe2 films can be used in all-optical logic gates, fast optical switch, optical limiter, mode storage and so on.