Enter The Void, filmed in the mega-colorful Tokyo twilight, puts viewers in the mind of the protagonist Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) as his soul wanders the city and relives the tragedies of his life.
Oscar is an American drug-dealer living in Tokyo. As the viewer, you see what he sees and hear what he thinks.
He smokes the psychedelic drug DMT in his apartment and you see his hallucinations of unbelievable shapes, just as he does.
After being called to drop some drugs off at the local nightclub The Void—which ends up being raided by police—Oscar is shot dead in the night club restroom as he tries to flush the drugs. The cops walk in to check his pulse but as you hear his last thoughts and heart beats, Oscar’s soul leaves his body and the film shifts into an introspective drug-addled nightmare.
As a heavy drug user, Oscar’s soul is also trapped in the high of the DMT, adding effect to an already disturbingly colorful Japanese city where the people and their stories are far from colorful.
It is not an easy film to watch with loads of gore, sex, drug-use and extremely personal situations hidden away in the neon-lit buildings where Oscar’s soul can only idly watch.
You may not appreciate the film’s hallucinatory effects unless you yourself have ever tripped balls, but the film quickly sheds its drug theme, becoming a post-death journey filled with grim tragedies.
The film is harder to sit through than the Human Centipede only because if this scenario were true then we’d all be doomed to this idle post-death existence. Unable to communicate in any way and completely alone in a level of consciousness that would render some poor soul to the most helpless position ever known to man.
However, with the right state of mind, Enter The Void can be understood as a vicious over-the-edge film with a disturbing concept that makes death seem like only the first step into whatever may happen in the afterlife.
Enter The Void—2009—Directed by Gaspar Noé—Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta and Cyril Roy—161 Minutes
