Enter the Void

Title: Enter the Void

Director: Gaspar Noe

Year: 2009 (2010 USA)

Country: France

Language: English/Japanese

Studio: IFC Films

Rating: ** (2/5)

If you're one of the many people that take film critics' reviews as gospel, chances are you've already seen this movie or plan on seeing it. Enter the Void has been hyped as "The Fountain meets Trainspotting" and "Altered States for the pill generation" -- both of which suggest that this film couldn't possibly be anything but astonishing. However, despite a clever idea and some excellent special effects, having to sit through this film is the equivalent of being forced to bludgeon yourself in the face with rocks while at the same time giving yourself an icepick lobotomy and having to soil yourself in front of the person you find most attractive in the entire world. In other words, it's absolutely torturous.

Basically, the plot is this: Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a 20-something American living in a seedy part of Tokyo. He has no real family, as his parents were killed when he was a young boy. But he does have a sister with whom he has a close relationship, so he works as a drug dealer to make enough money to bring her over from the States so they can be reunited. Oscar is a bad influence, although he never seems to have any malice or ill will -- he just happens to mess up everyone's life around him. He gets his innocent younger sister into drugs upon her arrival, and she soon ends up working as an exotic dancer. Oscar then manages to have an affair with his friend/customer's mother, and when Victor (Olly Alexander) finds out about it, he sets Oscar up to be busted in a club called The Void. Only this drug bust ends up with Oscar being ruthlessly killed by Japanese police while he attempts to flush his stash down a toilet. Upon Oscar's death, his soul leaves his body and flies around Tokyo in a really annoying fashion and shows the reactions and events after his passing, as well as the events in his past that all led up to his demise.

That all sounds well and good, but there's a lot of crazy stuff going on in this movie that manage to screw up a perfect idea for a film. For starters, the opening sequence of Enter the Void is filled with annoying first-person shaky cam straight out of The Bourne Ultimatum, and the initial drug sequence is so seizure-inducing and uncomfortable to watch it makes the music video for "Smack My Bitch Up" by Prodigy look like something you'd want to watch with your grandparents. Queue up some absolutely atrocious acting from Paz De La Huerta and you've got yourself one bad first impression.

The middle part of the film is actually really entertaining and intriguing, but the director throws some of his sick and twisted fetishes in that shock the audience but do little else (much like he did with Irreversible and that 20 minute rape scene). There's a whole lot of incest innuendo going on here, mostly between Oscar and Linda, but also in flashbacks that involve Oscar and his mother. That kinda stuff isn't going to win over any fans, but it's actually the most tolerable subplot of the entire movie. Aside from a little brother-sister love, there's an abortion being performed with a big metal rod and a vacuum (they actually leave the fetus on a metal tray in the operating room), a ton of weird kinky sex, a childbirth where Paz actually sounds like she's having an orgasm rather than giving birth, some gay elevator blowjobs, closeups of penises thrusting and then ejaculating inside a vagina, and a whole bunch else.

There's so much that's awful and wrong about this movie that it would take a book to list everything. Though, one more thing must be said: this thing drags. Every time the viewer thinks it's about to end, it goes on for another 45 minutes. The ending of this movie could have been done in about 2 1/2 minutes and it would have been pretty awesome, but the last hour is a grueling, repetitive, and pointless journey that mostly consists of the spirit flying around all over the place and occasionally hearing some relevant dialog.

Gasper Noe can't be faulted for his lofty ambitions, but he can be faulted for screwing up a novel premise for a film by overindulging in every possible "creative" whim that he's ever had. This is one film that is in some serious need of editing, different actors, and a really big rewrite. Normally it's easy to see why so many critics all unanimously shower a film with praise, but honestly, you would have to be on the drugs that they take in this movie to think it's as good as everyone says it is. It's the first time in a long time that an "Oscar-worthy" film stunk as bad as this one does. If you're going to see it despite reading this, make sure you don't take a date with you, especially if you ever expect to have sex again. It's like Closer and Blue Valentine, only 300 times worse. This is a giant waste of time.