Explaining what exactly this film is or even what it sets out to accomplish is harder than you might imagine. Explaining who Gaspar Noé is as a filmmaker and what he did with his 2002 film Irreversible only begins to paint the picture. It lets you know that you’re going to be walking into something “artsy”. Probably the content is going to be controversial and at times hard to watch. The camera work is going to be, at times, challenging to watch due to it’s refusal to adhere to aesthetic norms, but will be at other times astoundingly beautiful due to it’s technical wizardry. Ultimately, I would say that you shouldn’t have this film explained to you whatsoever. Watching it is about the discovery. What is Noé trying to show me? Where is he trying to take me? Enter the Void is a piece of visual art first and a narrative second, maybe third, or not even at all. Probably you shouldn’t even read this review. Just go and see this film and get back to me later. Unless you’re easily offended. Or really, able to be offended at all. You should probably be warned before you go into this one that you’re going to be seeing pulsing, maybe seizure inducing visuals, tons of sexuality and nudity, incestual tension, graphic images of an abortion, tons of explicit drug use, and who knows how many other things that I can’t remember to mention right this minute. So if all of that sounds good to you, stop reading now; go, take in this unique film going experience. If not, maybe keep reading and see if I can entice you to sit through this one anyway. Or probably, more likely, leave this page and head over to Youporn for the rest of the night. Let’s be realistic.
The most memorable and immediately impactful aspect of this film is its setting. Our story takes place in Tokyo, but more a nightmarish, neon soaked, fever dream version of it than the real Tokyo we can go visit. I’ve always heard about the Japanese love of vending machines and the prevalence of them in that country, but here they are literally everywhere. Around every corner, built into every wall. This film’s Tokyo is a glowing nightmare of consumerism that could only be matched by the entirety of New York getting lit up like Vegas and turning into a modern version of Sodom mixed with the future world of Blade Runner. There is a character in the film building a neon light miniature of Tokyo in his apartment, and as we watch things unfold the version of Tokyo that our characters inhabit seems to morph more and more into this miniature until they are living in it entirely. What the intended effect of this was is beyond me, but it was undeniably interesting to watch. What year the story is set in isn’t really clear, but it doesn’t really matter much from what I can tell. Time here doesn’t work like it does in most movies. And this isn’t just a telling the story out of order thing like Pulp Fiction. One moment will morph into another without notice. Scenes repeat, in different orders, time loops back around on itself. Places merge, people merge. The worst thing you could do while watching this film is constantly worry about orienting yourself in the time and place. Just let it take you where it will. The way that it plays itself out isn’t arbitrary. It pays itself off. Moments are placed next to others so that they can color each other. They’re then repeated in a different order to make a completely different statement. Plot progression becomes expressive art.
The acting here isn’t very good, the characters very interesting, or the story very involved. Oscar and Linda are brother and sister. When they were young children their family was involved in a horrific head on collision that killed both the parents. They vowed to stay together forever after that, but were soon pulled apart by child services and sent to separate foster homes. Our story finds them reunited as adults in Tokyo, Oscar as a drug addict/dealer and Linda as an exotic dancer. It’s Oscar’s eyes that we see the story through. He spends much of the film looking for a potent hallucinogen called DMT and as the film opens he is in his apartment smoking his score. His drug use, and the fact that we see most of this film through his perspective can explain many of the psychedelic visuals. The actor, Nathaniel Brown, isn’t really given much to do, as we usually see things through his eyes or over his shoulder. The little dialogue that he gets is unimportant and delivered with a drugged out stupidity that sometimes sounds like he’s doing his best Napoleon Dynamite. He earnestly says things like, “everybody who has a job is just a slave”. No effort is made to make these characters clever, relatable, or likable. It’s a delving into their emotions that the film concerns itself with instead. Linda, played by Paz de la Huerta, is probably the most emotionally unstable character of the film. Her screaming, horrified reaction to her parent’s deaths is one of the central images of the film and it colors everything that we watch her do. Seemingly completely preoccupied with abandonment, she has no concept of boundaries, or what is and isn’t appropriate. She’s often nude in front of her brother, she embraces him, groping, nibbling, desperate to have anything stable to hold on to. She is so starved for connection and stability that her sexuality merges together with familial connection into a big, confused ball of train wreck. She is so desperate for anything to be permanent in her life and completely dedicated to her that it often seems like if she has to sleep with her brother to make it happen she is completely willing. The incestual tension is at its worst when she is under the influence. Drug use leads to a lot of questionable behavior in this film. Oscar is more well adjusted in this respect, but you can always sense a longing tension inside of him that eventually reaches it’s breaking point during a confrontation he has with an undergarment, and only gets worse from there. Paz de la Huerta really annoyed me throughout the film, and it was probably more her character being an annoying mess of a human being than it was her annoying me as an actress, but the feeling was there for sure. Does that make her performance effective? Probably. Cyril Roy played Oscar’s friend Alex and was the only performance in the film that I completely enjoyed. He didn’t get much screen time or much to do per se, but he was very naturalistic and engaging every second he is on screen. A lot of the time he is on screen he is walking and talking directly to the camera. The takes are long; any cuts that might be made are invisible. It’s a situation that I can imagine being hard for an actor to pull off without looking like they’re acting (like how good actors can be oh so bad when working with George Lucas and emoting only to green screens), but Roy is always believable in whatever situation he’s in.
Bad acting, for once, doesn’t manage to sink the entire boat, as the real star of this film is the camera. For the first 30 minutes you see everything as a first person shot through Oscar’s eyes. The effect takes a bit to get used to. You see through his eyes as he gets high. You follow him through the streets of Tokyo, alongside Alex, to a bar where a drug deal is to happen. You run into the bathroom with him when the cops show up. And you’re inside of his body when he is shot through the chest and dies. Once he dies the camera goes from first person perspective to subjecting us to several minutes of strobing white light. Once that’s over you and Oscar are a spirit. Oscar keeps his promise to his sister that they will always be together, and even if they die they will come back to stay with each other. You float above the scenery, flying through the city, passing though walls, and spying on things from the ceiling. It feels a lot like the visual style of Wings of Desire, but more surreal than that, mixed with the craziest moments of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Or in flashbacks to the past, you see things right over the young Oscar’s shoulder. It feels more like being on a theme ride than it does watching most any other movie you’ve ever seen. Every once in a while you float into the back of someone’s head and start to see things from their perspective. The first time this happens we go into the head of the strip club owner Mario as he has sex with Linda. Essentially, we are watching ourselves have sex with our sister through this man’s eyes. The shit gets piled up deep in this film, and it’s important to have a strong stomach to handle it. These early scenes, with the floating camera and the entering of other character’s perspectives, they read like a setting up of the visual rules of the film. It feels like the world building scenes in Inception. And from that point on the ride never ends. We are in a person’s body when they die, we are in a vagina during conception, and we are in a person’s body when they are born. This is a lot of stuff to experience in one film. Your vision gets blurry as the character you are inside smokes DMT. Similarly, your vision is blurred when you are a newborn being birthed and experiencing the world for the first time. Several times you are, without warning, thrown back into the horrific car crash of Oscar and Linda’s childhood. It effectively recreates the shock and horror of the experience every time. During the scenes where the film gives way to pulsing visuals I often felt like Alex in A Clockwork Orange. I could feel how wide my eyes were open. I could visualize how the colors must look playing off of my face from the outside of my body. Enter the Void is truly a visual experience like no other film that I have seen.
A flashback in the film shows a young Oscar asking his mother who she loves more, him or his father. She replies that she loves them both equally, but in very different ways. In response, Oscar could only ask, “why”. This simple question seemed to be at the center of the film and the heart of what Noé was processing as he put together this project. Why would one kind of love be different from another? Isn’t love an absolute? Why do we categorize and divide it? This question, this confusion, colors everything that we see happen in the film. Enter the Void is all about blurring every dividing line that man perceives to exist. It blurs the line between life and death by putting us in the perspective of a spirit. It blurs time by simultaneously putting us in the past and present and not allowing us to experience these people’s story in a straight time line like we’re used to. It blurs the line between familial love and sexual attraction. Sucking on the breast of an exotic dancer suddenly morphs into suckling the breast of your mother as an infant. An awkward encounter walking in on your parents having sex as a child morphs into a scene of walking in on a couple having sex in a seedy nightclub. You’re never given enough time to get your bearings and realize which you are watching; the images come fast, and you’re given little opportunity to orientate yourself in the scene. The climax of the film takes place in a love hotel that we saw earlier existing in the Tokyo miniature, but which the full cast of characters that we’ve been introduced to now inhabits. When Oscar was shown the miniature early in the film he remarked that he would like to see a translucent hotel that he could look through the walls of and watch everyone he knows having sex. Well, now that he is a spirit, this is what we do. The bodies joined in copulation glow with unnatural light. Their genitals are pictured as being full of power, glowing and pulsing. They are the connectors that join us together. Near the end of the film the sex has resulted in us being born anew. When the chord is cut and we’re taken away from our mother we scream in trauma. It’s very reminiscent of the scene where Linda is pulled from the wreckage and taken away from her parents, or the one where she is screaming as she is torn away from her brother by social services. Separation is death. Connection is life.
While much of this film is truly hypnotic and deeply interesting, once you reach the two-hour mark things hit a wall and start moving very slow. In a span of just a minute or two I sensed the other people in the theater go from being enraptured to being very visibly fidgety, all at once. If there is one big flaw that Noé isn’t able to avoid it isn’t the bad dialogue, the less than stellar acting, or the simplistic plot; it’s that he keeps this whole insane show going on for just too long. Personally, I was always interested to keep watching where the film was going, but after that two-hour mark I became very aware of how much time was passing. Two hours and fifteen minutes in and I found myself actively wishing that I didn’t have to go through the process of extended flying through the city in order to get from scene to scene. I know that this conceit was much of the point of the film, but can’t we just stay with the characters for a minute and wrap this thing up? No, I guess we can’t. We need to travel down a light tunnel hiding behind every orb that appears in the film: every lamp, every drain, every bullet hole, every vagina, and every bedpan full of after-abortion. Staying with the characters and hearing their story isn’t the point. This experience is. I read articles claiming that there were people who became depressed after seeing Avatar, because after being immersed in the world of Pandora they just couldn’t take coming back to reality. If that was the case, then I can imagine a group of people similarly freaking out because they feel like they will be trapped in the world of Enter the Void forever.
