Enter the Void

ENTER THE VOID (2009) - Sept. 15, 2009
More of an experience than a traditional movie, this was a strange, haunting, flat-out bizarre and kind of brilliant film. About a drug dealer in Japan, who dies and then begins to float above his friends and his sister, and re-lives some of the highlights (and lowlights) of his life. The entire thing is shot from the drug dealer's point of view (other than the flashbacks, which are shot over his shoulder), from the pre-death stuff with him getting high and having a conversation about death with one of his friends and subsequently getting shot and killed, to all his post-death experiences, all the way to his reincarnation. A technical and directorial tour-de-force, this definitely establishes Gaspar Noe as some kind of crazy genius -- there really never has been a film quite like this before. Powerful and almost always visually stunning, the film feels a bit long, particularly towards the end, but that's almost beside the point. The film succeeds brilliantly at evoking a certain mood and tone, and is almost ridiculously hypnotic -- even when there isn't much happening, there's almost always something bizarrely fascinating about the movie, and I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching some kind of crazy masterpiece (a flawed one, but a masterpiece nonetheless). Certainly, it's rare that you see a film that's so amazingly unique -- I'm fairly confident that, for better or for worse, this movie is going to be remembered for a long, long time just for trying something that's so dazzlingly unique. Walking out of the theatre, I had the strangest feeling; a strange sort of numbness that I almost can't describe, like my brain wasn't quite sure if the movie had ended and real life had begun. It was an odd sensation, and one that took me a good fifteen minutes to shake. What a crazy, crazy movie. WTF man. WTF. Also: I think, more than any other movie I've seen in my life, this *needs* to be seen on the big screen. I can't imagine that it would have nearly the same impact on a little TV. I think it would be a different movie entirely, quite frankly. It just needs to be witnessed in a dark theatre on a gigantic screen. ****