Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
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.