Enter the Void

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

Three confused attempts at a critique, because this film is confusing and left me bewildered.---️ Attempt 1:– Birth – Life* – Death – Rebirth** –*Sex, suffering, love, desire, pain, darkness, artificial light**Achieved through mind-altering drugs?---️ Attempt 2:The cinematic attempt to depict the use of mind-expanding drugs. Goal: To put the audience in a trance, make them aware of their own existence, question being, and explore the self.**The constant thumping bass helps with this, only occasionally interrupted by a touch of Bach.--- Attempt 3:A drug trip of a film, filled with flickering lights, hardcore sex, and violence. The movie lets me smoke crack for five minutes, then takes me by the hand to float like a ghost through the eternally nocturnal Tokyo, driven by Freudian desire for my own sister, watching her have sex and undergo the resulting abortion, entering the minds of her lovers to bring her a piece of happiness.--- My boyfriend said the film is misogynistic. I don't know if I see it that way. I don't even know what to make of this film. What I do know: I didn’t expect to take on the POV of a vulva, getting penetrated and ejaculated into. And I didn't remember that these last minutes would remind me of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY.

It’s hard to give that film a score, because the movie has a lot of nice qualities, but at the same time some big downs. Enter the void tried really hard to show the world of drugs and death and it succeeded in that. Both main characters piss you off with their slow-moving face, reactions, actions and just life experience. I would say too much lights, too fast changing lights, too bright, too annoying for the eyes sometimes. But actually, there is this idea behind what is happening in the film, that’s makes the movie - must seen. :)

I wanted to like this movie and I wanted it to get better but it never did. Long, tedious shots of blinking lights and pans through walls and over rooftops are not my idea of storytelling. The movie intends to be artful, perhaps, but there is nothing artful at all about the director's inability to pace this properly. In between the unbearably long scene changes there is a highly original (if relentlessly dreary) story based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead as seen through the eyes of a young drug casualty. I would say that the director is obviously misanthropic, too, and that's not a view I share. (Maybe that's the key, then. Maybe he's trying to tell the audience, "Look at what a bunch of idiots you are, sitting through all this turgid nonsense.") Anyway, it's horrible in a variety of ways but I'll give him points for telling an original story (which would have been about a half hour long) and going some places movies have never gone before (but going many more places no movie has a right to bother).

Une sorte de kaléidoscope abrutissant de toutes les couleurs, puis des plans recyclés de camés en vue à la première personne, en vue à la troisième personne, en vue aérienne… est-ce une espèce de jeu vidéo pas interactif ? Dommage, car avec un minimum d’intelligence et de bon sens (ce dont est dépourvu le réalisateur) il y avait moyen éventuellement de faire quelque chose de correct d’1h30, enfin peut-être. Là, c’est chiant, chiantissime, supra-über-méga-over-chiantissimo. Bon d’accord, y a de la bombasse ici et là et de jolies couleurs, une certaine esthétique (mais trop de cannabis), ça nous fera donc 2. Et c’est bien payé malgré des plans calmes et lents (ou en dépit ce ceux-ci, on ne sait plus très bien dans ce film de drogués).