Enter The Void

There is no dismissing the ambition of Enter The Void, a truly remarkable exploration of life, death and everything in between. Ambition only carries you so far and in this case it’s about 90 minutes along the road to your destination but those 90 minutes are gobsmacking as we see everything from the point of view of Oscar, both living and dead. Almost immediately into the film he’s smoking drugs and hallucinating some of the most gorgeous abstract visuals I’ve seen onscreen. To be honest, if the entire film were just Oscar on a drug trip, I would’ve been a happy man. But the visual tour de force continues, as we walk with Oscar and his friends, die and float above his body, then travel across the seamy side of Tokyo and watch the story of his life unfold, even as the stories of his friends and family continue on. It really is stunning, an arresting experience that really gripped me. The visual style is amazing, the way Noé signals the past and the present is really clever, and the interplay of those colliding sets of events in the ghostly experience of the afterlife is excellent.

But now for some basic maths: 161 minus 90 equals 71. So that’s just under half the runtime remaining, and that second half is a genuine ordeal. Early on, Noé employs some interesting visual techniques to flow from scene to scene. Building on the photogrammetry technique pioneered ten years ago in Fight Club, the camera flies around the city, dives into buildings and rooms, in and out of household items and hovers over lights or flames to transition to the next scene. It starts off as interesting, but over time becomes tired and predictable. Boredom sets in as the entire story becomes obvious. We know how it’s going to end but we get dragged through more and more dull and desperate scenes giving us information or abstracting events in ways that by that point nobody cares about. Noé knows he’s boring the audience, so he ramps up the “shock” value, the climax of his desperation being a jizz shot shown from inside the vagina. It’s not even that original, I saw the same thing in a year 10 biology class. And all it elicited from the totally bored audience I was sitting with was laughter. Everyone was bored. I should stress that. Everyone. One guy got up when he thought it was finished and kept on walking when he realised it was still going. He yelled “See you in four hours!” as he left, and everyone laughed. We were not as weak as him, we would suffer through to the bitter end to see if the end could justify the tedium of repetitious CG wankery and try-hard shock tactics. But in the end, we were defeated and disappointed.

Those first 90 minutes are some of the best cinema I’ve seen all year, and it demands to be seen on a giant cinema screen. So my best advice is to go on a cheap day and then walk out the moment you start to feel restless. Don’t hope for it to get better, it doesn’t. It’s an epic failure and the world is a richer place for it all the same.

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