Enter the Void
2010 · Directed by Gaspar Noé
Original language: English
- fantasy
- drama
The story
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.
What it’s like
Neon-soaked and hallucinatory, shot in a restless first-person camera that drifts, swoops and spins through Tokyo's love hotels, bars and rain-slick streets, with saturated reds, electric blues and strobing light that turns every room into a fever dream. The sound is a thudding techno and drone score broken by sudden silences, the mix thick with breath, traffic and muffled voices, so the whole film feels like being inside a head on a bad night. Its vibe is feverish, claustrophobic grief, the kind of experience best saved for a late night alone when you're ready to be unsettled rather than soothed. Pacing is slow and looping, stretched across a long, disorienting afterlife, and the emotional arc follows a lost young man who cannot let go of his sister, tracing a bond that turns from dependence into something like devotion. Intensity is high: frequent drug use and hallucinatory distortion, sexual content and nudity, graphic violence including a shooting and a long, unflinching sequence after death, and an overall sense of dread and cruelty that lingers. Not gentle. Made for viewers who want immersive, uncompromising cinema that treats the afterlife as sensation rather than story.
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