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Editorial Reviews
Controversial and brilliant director Gasper Noe follows his worldwide sensation Irreversible with another triumph. Enter The Void is Noe s most assured and haunting film yet, a head trip a la Stanley Kubrick s 2001: A Space Odyssey and at the same time a piercing modern drama. Newcomer Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta (HBO s Boardwalk Empire) star as a brother and sister trapped in the hellish nighttime world of Tokyo where he deals drugs and she works as a stripper.
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A crime gone bad leads to shocking violence and then moments of transcendence in which the movie plunges viewers into death and rebirth like no film has ever done before via mesmerizing camerawork (The New York Times) that make it a dazzling and brutal exercise in cinematic envelope-pushing (New York Post). Stunning audiences around the world, Enter The Void is a cinematic experience like no other.
Â
A crime gone bad leads to shocking violence and then moments of transcendence in which the movie plunges viewers into death and rebirth like no film has ever done before via mesmerizing camerawork (The New York Times) that make it a dazzling and brutal exercise in cinematic envelope-pushing (New York Post). Stunning audiences around the world, Enter The Void is a cinematic experience like no other.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
84 of 96 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
If there was ever a two minute opening credit sequence that could grab me by the balls, it's from Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void. I'm confident it will have that effect on most people. You can see it here if you don't believe me. I've never seen anything quite like it. It's a strange beginning when considering the way it contrasts with the rest of the film. This hyper-frenetic, psychedelic introduction is the star of a film running around two and a half hours, and you'll feel every minute of its run time.
Noé has made a career as provocateur. His last few films involve a level of violence, sex and depravity (and a mixture of all three) that anyone could argue is excessive and exploitive. The problem, however, is that Noé is so talented, it can't altogether be dismissed. It reminds of Lars von Trier, and his latest film Antichrist. Enter the Void doesn't represent a marked change in style for Noé. All the base elements are there: sex, drugs, incest, abortion. And it's completely warranted to feel you're owed an explanation as to why you should subject yourself to them. I don't have an answer. But I can say that there are such dazzling flashes of genius sprinkled in throughout the film, that wading through the rest of the bog will be worth it for some. Even though you'll come out of the experience probably feeling dirty, and empty.
Enter the Void is losely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a canon of scripture for Buddhists. It is an instructional manuel filled with directives for those between this life, and their next reincarnation-what they should prepare to experience, and how they should react. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is an American, living in Tokyo. Or at least a Noé-esque Tokyo full of drugs and bass-thumbing club music. He begins to deal some drugs and doing a lot of heavy psychedelics; the film opens on him smoking a bowl of DMT. Here, the screen evolves into rotation patterns, made up of bright colors, accompanied by resonant sounds. It's very clearly an hommage to Stanley Kubrick's famous tunnel of colored light scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the film premiered at Cannes, it was seventeen minutes longer. Seventeen extra minutes of these sorts of effects.
Shot from Oscar's point of view, we mainly get to see the back of his neck, only glancing at his face when he looks in a mirror. He gets gunned down by Tokyo police in a seedy club bathroon. As he's trying to dispose of his stash, he yells that he has gun to prevent them from entering his stall. He dies. At this point, Oscar's essence slowly seperates from his body, and the remainder of the film, still in Oscar's perspective, is seen from what is now nearly a third person, but wordless narrative. He floats about the city, through walls, no longer constrained by the limits of a physical body, but unable to communicate with the world that surrounds him.
He weaves in andout of his friends' presences, and follows his sister, Linda, around (a ubiquitously nude Paz de la Heurta). Linda, a stripper at a club named Sex Power Money) and Oscar share a bond much too close for comfort since a horrific, shared experience in their youth involving the death of their parents. Noé subjects the audience to this experience over and over again on screen which results in a slightly jarred understanding of why Linda and Oscar's relationship is so distorted. There are many scenes too unpleasant for any film. Particularly, an extremely realistic and graphic abortion, and an explicit sex scene made up of impossible, and impossibly candid shots.
Enter the Void could easily be classified as experimental as there's not really much that happens on screen from a plot's perspective. It's a lot of floating-in-the-sky camera work, with little onscreen substance. On one hand, this leaves plenty of room for meditation on what death is, and how we can, or should relate to it. And it's easy to take advantage of this opportunity. On the other hand, two hours of mediation isn't always the desired product when heading to the movies.
Noé provides his shocks and provocations. There's no shortage of them. But every now and then, all of the wildly unrestrained facets of the film converge and the cacophony of it all gets quite. Then there are, quite literally, revelatory moments that make Enter the Void exhaustively interesting, and completely unforgettable.
Noé has made a career as provocateur. His last few films involve a level of violence, sex and depravity (and a mixture of all three) that anyone could argue is excessive and exploitive. The problem, however, is that Noé is so talented, it can't altogether be dismissed. It reminds of Lars von Trier, and his latest film Antichrist. Enter the Void doesn't represent a marked change in style for Noé. All the base elements are there: sex, drugs, incest, abortion. And it's completely warranted to feel you're owed an explanation as to why you should subject yourself to them. I don't have an answer. But I can say that there are such dazzling flashes of genius sprinkled in throughout the film, that wading through the rest of the bog will be worth it for some. Even though you'll come out of the experience probably feeling dirty, and empty.
Enter the Void is losely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead, a canon of scripture for Buddhists. It is an instructional manuel filled with directives for those between this life, and their next reincarnation-what they should prepare to experience, and how they should react. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is an American, living in Tokyo. Or at least a Noé-esque Tokyo full of drugs and bass-thumbing club music. He begins to deal some drugs and doing a lot of heavy psychedelics; the film opens on him smoking a bowl of DMT. Here, the screen evolves into rotation patterns, made up of bright colors, accompanied by resonant sounds. It's very clearly an hommage to Stanley Kubrick's famous tunnel of colored light scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey. When the film premiered at Cannes, it was seventeen minutes longer. Seventeen extra minutes of these sorts of effects.
Shot from Oscar's point of view, we mainly get to see the back of his neck, only glancing at his face when he looks in a mirror. He gets gunned down by Tokyo police in a seedy club bathroon. As he's trying to dispose of his stash, he yells that he has gun to prevent them from entering his stall. He dies. At this point, Oscar's essence slowly seperates from his body, and the remainder of the film, still in Oscar's perspective, is seen from what is now nearly a third person, but wordless narrative. He floats about the city, through walls, no longer constrained by the limits of a physical body, but unable to communicate with the world that surrounds him.
He weaves in andout of his friends' presences, and follows his sister, Linda, around (a ubiquitously nude Paz de la Heurta). Linda, a stripper at a club named Sex Power Money) and Oscar share a bond much too close for comfort since a horrific, shared experience in their youth involving the death of their parents. Noé subjects the audience to this experience over and over again on screen which results in a slightly jarred understanding of why Linda and Oscar's relationship is so distorted. There are many scenes too unpleasant for any film. Particularly, an extremely realistic and graphic abortion, and an explicit sex scene made up of impossible, and impossibly candid shots.
Enter the Void could easily be classified as experimental as there's not really much that happens on screen from a plot's perspective. It's a lot of floating-in-the-sky camera work, with little onscreen substance. On one hand, this leaves plenty of room for meditation on what death is, and how we can, or should relate to it. And it's easy to take advantage of this opportunity. On the other hand, two hours of mediation isn't always the desired product when heading to the movies.
Noé provides his shocks and provocations. There's no shortage of them. But every now and then, all of the wildly unrestrained facets of the film converge and the cacophony of it all gets quite. Then there are, quite literally, revelatory moments that make Enter the Void exhaustively interesting, and completely unforgettable.
36 of 45 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
Spoilers herein!
The primordial notion behind it is rebirth, but rebirth not only in the actual reincarnated physical sense, as is ultimately consummated, but also rebirth in the sense of being reintegrated with the breast; the notion of incest is absolutely pulsating throughout the entire film, and the metamorphosis of characters experienced throughout the sexual encounters is brutally direct in this sense. It would seem that the dream-like state one is immersed in after death is what allows the maximal realization of this basic instinctive drive, since it would be a state in which all repression is lifted, and desire can be experienced in its purest, most raw form without the nay-saying psychic censor beeping like crazy. This is clearly too threatening for a conscious "normal" person to face up to in their everyday experience, thus dreams and reality are distorted to conform to our particular compromise formations, allowing us to live day-to-day without being overburdened by the anxiety of facing our sexual urges head-on.
In its analytic scope, the Oedipal ties are clearly laid out as unresolved; the little boy experiences the death of his parents with detachment, the death of the rival (his father) and of his love object (his mother) occurring simultaneously, a kind of reverse deus ex machina operating in a perverse way, the rival is killed but in a way that destroys the princess they were fighting over. The impotence he experiences (double meaning) carries its weight retroactively in the notion that his mother tells him that she loves Oscar and his father, but in "very different ways", the Lacanian notion of "the name of the father" rearing its ugly head, the mother loves something the son can never provide to her (the phallus), thus the sexualized love cannot be realized. But in a moment of utmost mirroring of the father figure, Oscar enters the body of the father and sees himself through his eyes, watching his mother contort during sex and seeing "little Oscar" at the door, watching his parents.
As the mother figure died, Oscar must appeal to the next best thing in line, the mother's daughter... And the pact to remain faithful to his sister creates a sublimated metaspace that permits the diluted enactment of his desire to be engulfed and reattached to the primordial breast, at least as a promise. Linda apparently shares in some kind of dynamic of her own, as she kisses her brother in a sensuous way, she herself living her own Elektra symbolism through Oscar. Anyway, as Oscar enters the head of Alex, the rule-free realm of the symbolic permits him to experience his fantasy of incest with his sister, turned mother (in a flash), turned sister... The morbid desire for fulfillment compels him to enter for a brief period into the aborted fetus his sister produced, even the split and murdered off component of his sister representing a possibly desired destiny. Truly the "come inside me" line almost in itself justifies choosing English as the primary language for this film, and the encapsulated space of his sister's uterus creates the holding environment for the engulfment to occur... attached at last; the most poignant moment is when the baby is still attached to his sister (or is it his mother?) by the umbilical cord and is brought to the nipple, which is the only element seen clearly (this was a very smart move, from all standpoints, as a baby's eyesight is 20/400 at birth). This moment brings to a close the consummation of Oscar's fantasy, and thus is reborn in a literal sense as well as through purposeful incestuous regression. The unity engendered and its inherent hope are fractured with the cutting of the cord, at which moment the baby immediately starts crying and is taken away, the promise of eternal bondage destroyed thus again, entering the void of an existence deprived of any enduring physical contact, regardless of how many times one reincarnates, even when one enacts their most basic forbidden wishes. On a more controversial note, perhaps Linda experienced the feeling of completeness in herself as well; her desire to possess the phallus of her brother/father becoming alive in a bizarre way. As a female entity she became whole by producing a phallus (satisfying the dispelled notion of "[...]envy"), and with a mind-twisting denouement she not only possesses but produces the familial phallus she so longed for, finding peace at last.
The primordial notion behind it is rebirth, but rebirth not only in the actual reincarnated physical sense, as is ultimately consummated, but also rebirth in the sense of being reintegrated with the breast; the notion of incest is absolutely pulsating throughout the entire film, and the metamorphosis of characters experienced throughout the sexual encounters is brutally direct in this sense. It would seem that the dream-like state one is immersed in after death is what allows the maximal realization of this basic instinctive drive, since it would be a state in which all repression is lifted, and desire can be experienced in its purest, most raw form without the nay-saying psychic censor beeping like crazy. This is clearly too threatening for a conscious "normal" person to face up to in their everyday experience, thus dreams and reality are distorted to conform to our particular compromise formations, allowing us to live day-to-day without being overburdened by the anxiety of facing our sexual urges head-on.
In its analytic scope, the Oedipal ties are clearly laid out as unresolved; the little boy experiences the death of his parents with detachment, the death of the rival (his father) and of his love object (his mother) occurring simultaneously, a kind of reverse deus ex machina operating in a perverse way, the rival is killed but in a way that destroys the princess they were fighting over. The impotence he experiences (double meaning) carries its weight retroactively in the notion that his mother tells him that she loves Oscar and his father, but in "very different ways", the Lacanian notion of "the name of the father" rearing its ugly head, the mother loves something the son can never provide to her (the phallus), thus the sexualized love cannot be realized. But in a moment of utmost mirroring of the father figure, Oscar enters the body of the father and sees himself through his eyes, watching his mother contort during sex and seeing "little Oscar" at the door, watching his parents.
As the mother figure died, Oscar must appeal to the next best thing in line, the mother's daughter... And the pact to remain faithful to his sister creates a sublimated metaspace that permits the diluted enactment of his desire to be engulfed and reattached to the primordial breast, at least as a promise. Linda apparently shares in some kind of dynamic of her own, as she kisses her brother in a sensuous way, she herself living her own Elektra symbolism through Oscar. Anyway, as Oscar enters the head of Alex, the rule-free realm of the symbolic permits him to experience his fantasy of incest with his sister, turned mother (in a flash), turned sister... The morbid desire for fulfillment compels him to enter for a brief period into the aborted fetus his sister produced, even the split and murdered off component of his sister representing a possibly desired destiny. Truly the "come inside me" line almost in itself justifies choosing English as the primary language for this film, and the encapsulated space of his sister's uterus creates the holding environment for the engulfment to occur... attached at last; the most poignant moment is when the baby is still attached to his sister (or is it his mother?) by the umbilical cord and is brought to the nipple, which is the only element seen clearly (this was a very smart move, from all standpoints, as a baby's eyesight is 20/400 at birth). This moment brings to a close the consummation of Oscar's fantasy, and thus is reborn in a literal sense as well as through purposeful incestuous regression. The unity engendered and its inherent hope are fractured with the cutting of the cord, at which moment the baby immediately starts crying and is taken away, the promise of eternal bondage destroyed thus again, entering the void of an existence deprived of any enduring physical contact, regardless of how many times one reincarnates, even when one enacts their most basic forbidden wishes. On a more controversial note, perhaps Linda experienced the feeling of completeness in herself as well; her desire to possess the phallus of her brother/father becoming alive in a bizarre way. As a female entity she became whole by producing a phallus (satisfying the dispelled notion of "[...]envy"), and with a mind-twisting denouement she not only possesses but produces the familial phallus she so longed for, finding peace at last.
43 of 57 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
The guy above did a wonderful job reviewing the film.
Anyway, this is the second Noe film I've seen (the first being Irreversible).
I just watched it 30 minutes ago in the theater and I can't sleep now.
It's 1:58 a.m. and I have film school tomorrow at 7.
I felt literally electrified when I walked out of the theater, my feet were jittery...
Only way I can even try to explain the film:
Imagine Eraserhead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Requiem For A Dream, and Irreversible smashed together with a lot of POV shots.
Watch this, please.
Anyway, this is the second Noe film I've seen (the first being Irreversible).
I just watched it 30 minutes ago in the theater and I can't sleep now.
It's 1:58 a.m. and I have film school tomorrow at 7.
I felt literally electrified when I walked out of the theater, my feet were jittery...
Only way I can even try to explain the film:
Imagine Eraserhead, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Requiem For A Dream, and Irreversible smashed together with a lot of POV shots.
Watch this, please.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Brilliant Movie -- If James Joyce had made movies
Noe's work is strongly visceral. ETV is a story about death and birth, and about life close to the bone, gristle, and guts of existence. Read more
Published 18 days ago by Maximillion Grant
Never seen a movie like it. And this is not a LONG review.
I was pretty reluctant to watch the film, due to the fact that I had heard it contained flashing lights and a first person view. But, once I finally put it on.. Read more
Published 26 days ago by Michael A Seidl II
Best movie I've seen in a long time
This movie is amazing. I have not seen a movie so well put together and so unique in a very long time.
Published 1 month ago by L. Guillermo
awesome
Best movie, the whole movie is awesome mind bending, along with amazing graphics
The experience blow my mind
wake up world, ur turn.
The experience blow my mind
wake up world, ur turn.
Published 2 months ago by sunny
Four and a Half for the ultimate trip
Enter the Void is like nothing I've even fathomed before, other reviewers on this site can and have explained what goes on in the film better than I can, but I wholeheartedly... Read more
Published 2 months ago by I'm right
A Visually Impressive Nightmare
It's hard to adequately describe a film like Enter The Void to people unfamiliar with modern day transgressive cinema; the combination of sacred and profane rarely elicits... Read more
Published 2 months ago by Brian Harris
Worth it
I hesitated on ordering this Gaspar Noe movie because of some of the negative reviews. I saw his other two movies and loved them and figured I'd try it. I'm glad I did. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Norrin Radd
experience the void
Go in with an open mind- marvel at the beauty; cringe at the gritty
Be hypnotized with the majestic imagery and appreciate the implications of life beyond the... Read more
Be hypnotized with the majestic imagery and appreciate the implications of life beyond the... Read more
Published 4 months ago by dan the movie fan
PURE CRAP!!!
I saw all the other four star reviews for this and I was in the mood for something really creative, so I paid my monies and bought it. BIG MISTAKE!! Read more
Published 5 months ago by Eugene F. Borg
Pretentious and boring
Pretentious and boring. The few potentially interesting ideas are submerged under prosaic drugs and sex and sophomoric stabs at profundity.
Published 5 months ago by Michael Harbour
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