Enter The Void
- Year:2009
- Rating:R
- Director:Gaspar Noé
- Cast:Nathaniel Brown , Paz De La Huerta
- Release Date:December 02, 2010
- Distributor:Transmission
- Running time:160 minutes
- Film Worth:$10.00
- FILMINK rates movies out of $20 - the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
While it opens strongly, this erratic ride soon loses its gripping momentum and descends into gratuitous sex and violence.
Enthralling, hypnotic but ultimately repellent, Enter The Void is an unforgettable cinematic experience. A drug-fuelled, mesmerising dreamscape, Irreversible director Gasper Noé merges ultra-violent, aggressively explicit neo-realism with experimental, sixties/seventies-esque avant-garde expressionism to convey the frightening abyss of death. Love it or hate it, Noé's unstable, erratic work is a vivid achievement until it falls under the weight of its own pretensions.
In modern Tokyo, French dealer Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is struggling with a dependence on the hallucinatory drug DMT as he is attempting to protect his stripper sister, Linda (Paz De La Huerta). When Oscar is killed, he becomes a supernatural force in his after-life, hovering around his sister and her acquaintances as they respond to his death.
Noé is an extraordinary talent. For the first twenty minutes of the film, the French director has created a near-masterful glimpse into psychedelic paranoia, using an extended take to embody the darker recesses of Oscar's troubled mind. But, like Lars Von Trier's Antichrist, early greatness soon descends into seedy, ugly unpleasantness as initial investment into Oscar's experiences eventually declines to irritation and, finally, intense boredom, as flashbacks are replayed ad nauseam to suggest an incestuous relationship between brother and sister.
Merging imagery that is lucid (a car crash is truly horrifying), bizarre (there are repeated sequences of Oscar's mother breastfeeding him) and ludicrous (um, a sex scene from the point of view of a reproductive organ), Enter The Void loses the gripping momentum of its earlier stages in favour of a monotonous depiction of Oscar's sexualised devotion to his sister. Whilst some of the brutality is legitimate and suitably shocking, much of it is less than justifiable, as the film descends into tediously graphic sexuality and violence that dulls the film's initial danger and intensity.
