Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
On Quartile, Enter the Void scores 7/10 across five categories — strongest on Cinematography (Well Above Average), weakest on Plot (Below Average).
Ranked among Quartile’s Top Cinematography.
This psychedelic tour of life after death is seen entirely from the point of view of Oscar, a young American drug dealer and addict living in Tokyo with his prostitute sister, Linda. When Oscar is killed by police during a bust gone bad, his spirit journeys from the past -- where he sees his parents before their deaths -- to the present -- where he witnesses his own autopsy -- and then to the future, where he looks out for his sister from beyond the grave.
Enter the Void is one of cinema's most audacious formal experiments — Gaspar Noé shoots the entire film from a first-person POV, first as a living character and then as a drifting spirit, with the camera gliding through neon-soaked Tokyo in long, unbroken takes. The cinematography is genuinely well above average: the opening title sequence alone is iconic, and the floating, omniscient camera perspective through the afterlife is unlike virtually anything else in mainstream cinema. Novelty is similarly exceptional — the DMT-inflected structure, the Tibetan Book of the Dead framing, the unflinching treatment of sex, death, and reincarnation give it a completely singular identity. However, the plot is thin and repetitive, cycling through trauma and transgression without building meaningful dramatic momentum, and the acting — constrained by the POV conceit — is serviceable at best. The ending, while thematically coherent with the reincarnation concept, outstays its welcome and lands with diminishing impact after a punishing runtime.