The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Movie Review: Enter the Void

I imagine I'm quoting what a number of movie critics have already said, but hardcore weirdo Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void is a film unlike anything else out there. Which sounds like an overblown compliment, but it comes with ups and downs. Expecting anything from it is probably a mistake. If you stop and ask yourself what's going on, you'll probably be disappointed. I have a feeling it's a movie that benefits greatly from heavy drug use, and would recommend it to anyone looking for something to watch for their next acid trip. I would, however, advise against it for people with epilepsy or anything like it, as the bombastically frenetic opening alone will likely hospitalize them.

Once you get past the main titles it grinds to an incredibly slow pace. The film is told entirely from the first-person perspective of Oscar, a low-level American drug dealer living in Tokyo and played by Nathaniel Brown. While he's still alive, the cinematography emulates human vision with a number of details that sell it well, the camera properly jostling and frequently "blinking," and shortly into it we are treated to a sequence of Oscar's drugged out hallucinations. After musing with his sister, Paz de la Heurta's Linda, he travels with fellow junkie and best friend Alex played by Cyril Roy, and Alex explains the philosophy of life after death according to Tibetan Buddhism. The spirit lingers and observes until it is reborn. Afterwards, Oscar walks into a drug bust, everything goes to shit, he dies, and his spirit lingers and observes.

What follows is two hours of stream of consciousness storytelling. Oscar, or whatever it is that remains of him, files through memories, spirals into surreal flashes, ruminates on his life and the lives of his friends, and we watch him do it. There's a lot of down-time, repetition, and psychedelically kaleidoscopic light shows. Scenes flow into each other with the same jilted rhythm that thoughts do. At some points the audience is presented with imagery that reminds us of an earlier scene, and then see that earlier scene immediately repeated. It's disorienting at times, but worth experiencing.

That said, Enter the Void doesn't escape all criticism. While it tells a story in a spectacularly unique way, the story it tells has very long portions that aren't that interesting. It's made worse by leading man Nathaniel Brown, who isn't actually an actor and it shows. His delivery of inner monologue felt like watching a Youtube video. The flashbacks manage to remedy that by casting two pretty phenomenal children, Jesse Kuhn and Emily Alyn Lind, to play the young versions of Oscar and Linda respectively - these kids have incredibly demanding, highly emotive roles and perform them so convincingly it can be upsetting. Though his flashbacks reveal a great depth in Oscar, this never comes across in Brown. Ultimately the premise - an exploration of the death of a life shaped so heavily by death - is cool, but all the characters kind of suck (with the exception of scene-stealing and underused Alex) so it's difficult at times to give a shit about them.

For a movie that goes all out in so many ways, it feels like it's holding back in some key ones. Enter the Void is full of what seems to be unsimulated sex, and while there are frequent and explicit suggestions that Oscar has been romantically involved with both his good friend Victor played by Olly Alexander, as well as his sister Linda, we never see any of these sexual encounters, and in a stream of consciousness we would. There's also no gay sex involving Oscar's hardcore gay drug dealer Bruno (Ed Spears), including the sex scene he's involved in. We got one guy-on-guy blow job that's obviously fake, which I guess is something, but again: this is a film flush with graphic sex, but the rule seems to be only so long as it's a penis going into a vagina it's not related to. Blame international censorship complications or whatever, but this isn't a movie that's going to get wide release, so they might as well just go all out.

I'll say that Enter the Void is guilty of trying a bit too hard, but it can't be offhandedly discounted despite it's shortfalls. It's a really cool movie that merits viewing (if perhaps not owning), and I can see it being the inspiration for a better film later. Which might sound like a dick thing to say, but regardless, Noé has achieved something very interesting here that deserves to be paid attention to.