Starring: Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy
Plot: The story follows Oscar, a young American drug dealer who gets shot by the police, but continues to watch succeeding events during an out-of-body experience.
My Review and Thoughts:
Boy what a trip. This movie my give you seizures if you watch it. It opened my brain up, kind of took a hammer, smashing against my skull and just wiggled around my cranium. This is a movie that basically mind raped me without lube.
I think my corneas wanted to bleed. One hell of a trip inside the visual nature of insanity. Artistic colors, flowing vibrant visions of images, drug induced euphoria.
Oscar lives in Toyko. He is a young man who trips on drugs. His sister warns him he is becoming a junkie. He trips and visually enters personal hallucinogenic moments of confusion and non-clarity.
Oscar has become what his friends say is a supplier. He tells himself over and over again he is not a junkie or a dealer to try and reassure himself.
This might give some people motion sickness, it's done in a first-person kind of like you're in a video game, you're following along as you are the camera. Your seeing everything Oscar sees and experiences. Your his eyes and even when he blinks the screen goes black.
Boy I don't think I have ever been so spaced out in my life. This is a visual tour-de-force of colors, images, flashes, motions, it's like a dream state of nightmarish illusions that become reality.
The first part of the movie you experience it firsthand, first person point of view through the eyes of Oscar and then you experience the rest of the movie in an alternate out of body experience, floating above everything else, seeing everything as it unfolds in a spaced out like death trip.
This movie is by one of the greatest modern directors. This is a stunning disturbing portrait just like his other films that stand out as being something so vivid, something so graphic, something so mindbending the viewer can't help but think, wow, this is truly an extraordinary original masterpiece of something never done before.
I speak of Gaspar Noé who is an Argentine film director and screenwriter. Who brought out one of the most disturbing films ever done Irreversible. The performance, the acting, screenwriting and the graphic rape in Irreversible is something that will always stand out as being something that is almost unwatchable, yet done so believable, so reality-based that it's flooring to the point the viewer re-acts In horror at what they witness.
Enter the Void is another mind altering, disturbing masterpiece of modern cinematography, visual acting, and performances showcasing flashes of past present and future to tell a story in a true original way that's never been done before.
You witness Oscar's life through flashes and past events of remembrance through his floating present life.
This is a shocking experience for the viewer, a extraordinary re-telling of what life-and-death is, of what consequences are. The present is of what the past is, the idea of seeing yourself through all the stunning visuals, action, moments of remembrance through out your life in one step of death and a trip of drugs as your reality.
One does not need to ever trip on drugs, all you have to do is experience this film.
This is experimental cinema at its best and brings the psychedelic drug experiences for the viewer to journey throughout Noe's artistic approach in principal photography and camera work through massive crane work. The pull back shots and the moving shots of flight and hovering I cannot imagine the difficulty Noe had bringing this film together.
Oscar lives in Tokyo. He longs to bring his sister to Tokyo. Both are orphans they have been separated for many years. Now that Oscar is a drug dealer he has money and is able to bring his sister over to live with him. Soon she becomes part of the nightlife, along with Oscar, rave clubs, psychedelic trips, music, soon she becomes a dancer in a club and spirals downhill.
There's an odd relationship between Oscar and his sister, almost on the lines of incest but not. You can see the tension, the sexual undertones, the sexual reality that Oscar seems to have toward his sister.
The whole movie tells a story, a story that is thought-provoking, disturbing, reality-based, fantasy based. It's a story that gets to the viewer, that plays with the mind.
Now the musical score, soundtrack is a whole other subject itself. Experimental music, psychedelic music, club music, electronic spiraling into all genres.
(Noé describes the film's subject as "the sentimentality of mammals and the shimmering vacuity of the human experience.")
One has to see this to truly understand, to truly experience it. To truly grasp it's somewhat beauty, it's wanting emptiness.
A true original piece of cinema that has never been done before and possibly will never be done again. It captures something so visually stunning, so visually beautiful and yet so visually haunting that the viewer can't help but try and figure this movie out.
Experiencing this movie is almost like experiencing something that fresh, untouched or altered. It's a story book of imagination an adult story book of fantasy and dreams and most of all a nightmare that seems real.
There is a religious focus to the film, The Tibetan book of the dead, the idea of an out of body experience. The idea of the soul seeking life after death – the soul seeking to be reincarnated. Noe denies all religious reality. He is not a religious man and does not like religious focus points. There is the Tibetan book of the dead in the movie and the ideas discussed and the viewer can pick up on that type of reality.
(Noe says: " the whole movie is a dream of someone who read The Tibetan Book of the Dead, and heard about it before being [shot by a gun]. 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.")
Noé's favorite film, is 2001: A Space Odyssey, Noé knew he wanted to be a filmmaker after seeing it at the age of seven. You can clearly see the resemblance to many of the moments in Enter The Void that would've been visuals influenced by 2001 Space Odyssey, you could see the very nature of Kubrick in this film.
What is amazing to know is the script to the film took 15 years to create. It was a 15 year process. Interesting to note the idea for this came to Noe in his adolescence when he became interested in the idea of life and death. Noe stated that when he was 20 he took some mushrooms and tripped while watching the 1947 movie Lady in the Lake which this film was shot in a first-person reality.
Noe said that if he was ever to do a movie about the afterlife it would be done in this idea, from a first person point of view.
Noé did many different types of drugs in his younger years causing many hallucinogenic moments. He would use these hallucinogenic moments as inspiration for his style of filmmaking. While starting to plan and make this film Noe tried the psychoactive brew ayahuasca, the active substance is DMT. He did this to experience what he wanted for the film, he tripped on this brew in the Peruvian jungle which the substance is a tradition.
Noe gives his heart, soul, mind, imagination, his very dreams and his visions to his films. A dark side along with a darker side is Enter the Void.
For this is not just a movie, it's an experience.