Enter the Void - Gaspar Noé

Prolonged exposure to Enter the Void may cause seizures. It’s possible that director Gaspar Noé is actively trying to cause seizures. He drifts his camera into light sources like a moth to a flame, filling the entire frame with pulsating light. Many other scenes take place in nightclubs with flashing displays, and the film flies us over Tokyos both real and imagined, their neon kaleidoscope signs irradiating our senses like Las Vegas on ecstasy. The characters take ecstasy too. Often.

Do I like this film? It’s a simple question without a simple answer. There are aspects that are brilliant. There are stretches that are unendurable. Its ideas are intriguing. Its visual style is striking, though often garish and dreary; several scenes are coated in a deep red light like being trapped in a photographer’s darkroom. As I watched it I waited restlessly for it to end, but as I consider it now I feel a certain grudging admiration for it. It’s a journey of the soul, and though bleak in its telling it seems to arrive at a kind of hope, if you can manage to wade through the murk of Noé’s indulgent psychosexual fantasies.

It opens with a spectacular main titles sequence, flashing cast and crew relentlessly before our eyes before placing us in the point of view of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), an American drug dealer living in Japan with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta). The camera acts as his eyes on the last day of his life, which unfolds remarkably through a psychedelic drug-trip and then some existential pondering with Alex (Cyril Roy), who hopes his friend will embrace spirituality instead of increasing drug dependency. Alex explains the nature of the soul as described by The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which sets up how the rest of the film unfolds. After he’s shot to death in a nightclub, Oscar seems to drift backwards and forwards through time, trying to find his way back to Earth.

The title Enter the Void refers to the name of the club where Oscar is shot, but also to the metaphysical suspension of his spirit. In death, he floats through memories of his childhood, repeatedly revisits the horrific car accident that killed his parents, and considers his sister, with whom he shares a vaguely incestuous bond. After the spellbinding opening scenes, his this-is-your-life self-inventory is surprisingly somnolent, meandering, and lacking in urgency, though punctuated with flashes of graphic violence or sex that shock us back to attention. In a good way? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There’s one great scene where Linda confronts Oscar’s friend, whom she blames for her brother’s death, leading to an explosive outpouring of grief and rage. At other times I felt like the subject of electroshock experiments.

There’s some facile Freudian analysis (juxtaposing Oscar’s older lover with his breastfeeding mother), and towards the end the film descends into abstract, orgiastic debauchery that goes on, I think, longer than Noé needs to make whatever point he’s making. The director, through Oscar, becomes a spectral voyeur, and on multiple occasions he assumes the man’s point of view during sex to watch women in the throes of ecstasy. How much of this is meaningful, and how much is directorial masturbation?

I can’t recommend this film in the sense that I think you’ll enjoy it. I’m not sure Noé even recommends it. To Interview Magazine he denied that it’s about anything at all: “It's not the story of someone who dies, flies and is reincarnated, it's the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream.” So be it. If that sounds like a good time to you, you probably already know it. If it doesn’t, trust your instincts.

Watch a trailer for the movie here: