Film Review: Enter the Void

Director: Gaspar Noé

After I Stand Alone and Irreversible, Gaspar Noé has a reputation as a very daring and shocking film-maker. The violence in his movies is almost unparalleled and his films are often very different in terms of visual style and presentation. He creates scenes that are completely unforgettable and challenges the boundaries of modern cinema, for which he should be applauded.

High visualized view of downtown Tokyo

Noé first tried to fund this film in the early 2000's but it was deemed too expensive and was shelved until after Noé had success with Irreversible and was a more established film maker. Despite this, Enter the Void was a big box office failure with financiers Wild Bunch claiming they made back less than 2% of their investment.

The film is filmed in the first person, with blinking and everything, as we follow Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) who is a drug dealer in Tokyo. We see him get a high in one beautifully colourful scene before he is busted at a local bar called The Void, instead of surrendering he flees to the bathroom then tries to escape by claiming he has a gun. The Japanese police shoot him which sees us stylishly watch Oscar's death whilst his spirit remains floating above the city able to watch the world unfold before him.

The film is related to The Tibetan Book of the Dead which is a Buddhist book about the afterlife and spirits. The visual effects are truly stunning from the drug induced hallucinations in the first scene with Oscar to the very end where Tokyo is represented by bright neon lights and by the sex scenes all in the same hotel complex. The shooting style of being truly first person followed by a nearly constant floating presence from above really works and continues Noé's tradition as ground breaking film maker.

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) dead in the toilet

Here we have a film that has a very human element to it, Irreversible lacked this as the sickening violence all occurred at the beginning of the film when you didn't know why the characters were acting as they did or who they really were. Enter the Void is a much more touching story as we learn about the childhoods of Oscar and his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) who has joined him in Tokyo. Their relationship is incredibly strong but frail after what they have been through and because of the lives they both lead now.

Only one thing stopped this from being a four out of four masterpiece and that was the length, at around 160mins it really is an excruciating battle to get to the end. The great ideas in plot and cinematography are watered down by the sheer excessive nature of their use, if Noé could have cut an hour out of the film (entirely possible) then it would have been a much greater movie for me.

3/4 Incredibly stylish and daring but a real slog