Written and Directed by Gaspar Noe
Director of Photography Benoit Debie
Edited by Gaspar Noe, Marc Boucrot, Jerome Pesnel
Visual Effect Director Pierre Buffin
Production Designers Kikuo Ohta and Jean Carriere
Art Supervisor Marc Caro
Sound Design Ken Yasumoto
Sound EFX Director Thomas Bangalter
Starring
Nathaniel Brown as Oscar
Paz de la Huerta as Linda
…
“Within the 38th consecutive hour of Tetris lies the bardo gate.”
-William D. Tucker, Tetris enthusiast
…
Review by William D. Tucker.
A man dies. His ghost leaves him. He’s a ghost now. Ghost zips around the city in which he died, bearing witness to the effects of his death.
You ever fantasize about that? About attending your own funeral, or being able to observe the people you would leave behind once you’re dead? That’s the fantasy that drives Enter the Void, a kind of visually audacious spiritual/faith-based porn movie I once purchased on DVD at a Best Buy 10,000 fuckin’ years ago.
The city is Tokyo. The dead man is a white guy from America who’s set himself up as a drug dealer in a foreign country in order to avoid working a real job which he views as a form of bondage. He’s trying to cut ties to the trauma of his past, but ends up creating nothing but sorrow for himself and the people to which he is connected.
The dead guy has an uncomfortably close relationship with his sister, who eventually joins him in Tokyo. Their closeness isn’t weird to them, not at first, but it’s definitely meant to push audience buttons, and it also ends up causing difficult feelings for the dead man.
When the film begins, we are in first person perspective, reminiscent of a video game such as Doom or Wolfenstein 3-D. But instead of firing a gun, our POV character-the future dead man-smokes powerful hallucinogens and we see his grimy, cramped apartment invaded by spirit tentacles that inhale us all into a wild fractal organism’s gullet. Who’s smoking who, eh?
Or something.
After our POV guy dies, his spirit seems to be pulled this way and that by strong desires that keep him bound to the world of the living. His spirit is drawn to wherever he senses his sister is or one of the other people he’s tied to by bonds of love or hate or both. Our dead guy even jumps into vivid memories of his past. Much is made of a fanciful oath that brother and sister once swore as children that they would never be apart, and that they would never die. Our ghost begins to follow his past self around, trying to get a new perspective on all the forces and actions that led him to his death. He cannot change his fate, but he can enhance his understanding of how he ended up as a stubborn ghost.
Sometimes mundane real world things become spiritual teleport pads or expressway tunnels traversing the world of the dead. Fire, light, electricity, gunshot wounds, open urns, and inert organic matter offer secret gateways as things which are textbook physical phenomena to the living become charged with mystical power to one who is among the restless dead.
You ever wondered what it would be like to be a ghost drifting through a strip club? Enter the Void has answers.
Oh . . . and don’t watch it with the kids. If you do, the questions will never end. Just trying to help.
Enter the Void uses elaborate camera work and highly detailed computer generated imagery to tell a story both cosmic and intimate. It isn’t perfect. The drugs, the sex, the sleaze, the unlikeable protagonist are all gonna be deal breakers for some or maybe even most audiences.
But I find it fascinating that you could have a special effects heavy movie that isn’t about Avengers fighting an evil purple man with a plastic death glove. It also has no known ties to Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, or Harry Potter, which is nice.
And our ghost guy wouldn’t be tied to this world if he were a saint. He would just ascend to the Great Country Buffet in the Sky if he were free of his burdens of guilt and trauma and hatred and lust. Enter the Void is a rare thing: a faith-based movie that skips empty moralizing sermons and actually takes seriously all the bizarre spiritual issues with which it wrestles.
It’s kinda neat.
