Enter The Void

IMDB
First time viewed: Yes
Current Release: Yes
Watched With: Mum

I don't recommend watching this with your mother.

Trippy film huh? A first person point of view of the afterlife from before a drug dealer is shot to after he floats around Tokyo watching over his sister and friends. The drama and characters aren't that great but that's not really the point here, it's the way it's delivered in this very hypnotic visual style.

It's a long film too but I guess that helps when you are trying to convey eternity.

The opening credits suggest you are in for a crazy epileptic trip and these flashes of light and colour do feature prominently through the film but it's not nearly as fast paced as you are led to believe from the titles. Instead you get into the head of this character and then watch events unfold, mainly from a birds eye view, which I found strangely distancing from the drama and the rest of the characters. It made it hard to connect to any of the characters when at any moment you feel like you could float through a wall and be looking at something else.

This film is a technical marvel. The only other Gaspar Noé film I've seen was Irreversible, I have had I Stand Alone on dvd for sometime but never found the right time to watch it. I shall have to do that soon. But like Irreversible the camera is a character in the film, one that floats from scene to scene in huge long takes where action plays out in full. This time though the camera is given even greater freedom and constantly flied through walls and over cities and streets to find other pieces of a disparate story.

The effects in these transitions and also the interlinking acid trippy sequences are stunning. In fact the majority of frames in the substantial running time has been effected in some way. There is a huge use of selected focus that must have caused a headache for the months of rotoscoping involved. But it allows the edges of the images to just blur away giving the film a dream like style.

Likewise the sound is effected so a lot of the audio sounds blurry. We can hear the characters thought and speech clearly at the beginning and other dialogue and sound is also treated in a first person point of view style. Later on the background soundscapes come to the fore or sometimes drop out all together which is an effect I quite like.

Ultimately this film is visually and technically amazing. It's hypnotic and given the first person point of view sometimes feels voyeuristic and over indulgent. I love love love the sound design, the hyper neon style colours, the camera work and even the thematic motifs and ideas explored in the film but ultimately found it emotionally void.