Enter the Void (2009)

This review shouldn’t contain any spoilers.

Enter The Void is a film by Gaspar Noé featuring Paz de la Huerta, Nathaniel Brown and Cyril Roy, released in 2009. It takes place in Tōkyō, and tells the story of an American drug dealer killed by the police in a drug deal gone bad whose soul escaped from its bodily inclosure and observes the events after his death.

I have watched this for the first time on 2013-10-02.

I was impressed by the special effects and the dreamy ambiance they gave to the whole experience, their placement in the continuity of the story is especially good, without them, the film would seem quite out of place. What caught me off guard was the darkness, the gruesomeness and the complete lack of heroism in anything. It was a bit upsetting, but in retrospect, very appropriate to the themes of the story.

The camera technique is also quite interesting, the whole film is in the hero’s subjective view, but since he’s a “ghost”, most of the time, there are no limitations, and the transition between scenes is creative.

What surprised me was the complete lack of inhibition: there is violence, sex, drugs and the Tōkyō nightlife is portrayed in a very honest light. There’s a not-so-subtle hint of incest, even. Fortunately, the MPAA couldn’t get their hands on this one, it hasn’t been censored, and wouldn’t accomodate any form of censorship.

The only thing I really disliked was the sacred aura around sex Gaspar Noé decided to include, correlating intercourse with procreation in an absurd way, almost laughable from a scientific point of view. I wonder how offended the LGBT crowd would be by that.