Enter the Void

When the opening credits are the most impressive part of a 161-minute movie, something is simply wrong. Enter the Void is a silly, primordially shocking and self-absorbed festival of nonsense, that is, to top it all off, excruciatingly long and painfully tedious. Everything it manages to impress with, happens in the first half hour, followed by almost endless introspection, with utterly ridiculous dialogues and a banal story, all wrapped up in psychedelic robes. If I use one simile in line with this movie’s content, I would compare watching it to a girl not wanting to get off you after mutually climaxing, and casually kept your dick in her hand, trying to pull you off for two more hours in the same position. Tedious as fuck! There is almost nothing to complain about the audiovisual experience in the first hour, but after an hour even that gets boring, and all the POV camera zooms, and the transitions become extremely repetitive and annoying. And last but not least, the potential that Tokyo as a location for a movie, with all the interesting aspects it specifically offers. is absolutely wasted here – the whole of Tokyo, or even Japan, is reduced to a place with a few neon-lit streets and nothing more, so the movie could have been set basically anywhere in the world and the result would have been exactly the same. Oh yeah, it is a severe disappointment. If Noé hadn't tried to turn this into an erotic drama with a nod to Tibetan Buddhism, and just made an unpretentious straight-up porno with a polished audiovisual look, he would have done much better. I give it a better 1 star. (18.02.2021)

An incredibly smooth film trip. At the end I felt like I was falling into absolute emptiness. Although the 140 minutes are far from flawless and do leave you shaking your head in places, this mixture of hallucinogenic trips, porn and existential hangovers is simply one of the highlights of this year. I agree with those who would rather not see what happens when the first circle closes... but it doesn't change much about the mental crater. (29.04.2010)

I simply have to appreciate Gaspar Noé for his innovative approach to filmmaking, presenting viewers with something completely new and not shying away from depicting explicit content, especially sex, although the same goes for violence in his films. Unfortunately, in terms of content, his films just don't resonate with me much. (16.11.2016)

The entire film fluctuates between opening and closing title sequences, between two Tokyo bars, between life and death - and between Enter and the Void. In the average middle position between these almost three-hour amplitudes lies (although not in the middle of the runtime) the central sentence of the film, which states that drug XY (I don't remember the name) has the same effect as death. Noé therefore embarks on a deep drug trip, but here a problem arises - three hours need to be filled with some type of material and content on the basis of which the trip can take place. We must not be fooled: although the trip is in its visual effects a pure form and abstraction, in a drug-induced frenzy the "content," the "meaning," and what "was so beautiful" is always somewhat present and inevitably attached itself to the hallucinogenic audiovisual experience without being “just” it. In other words, a (film) trip also requires a screenplay that enables the trip, and here Noé falls short - banal thoughts about reincarnation (legitimizing camera techniques and the plot of the film), pathetic parallels between children and death, etc. Oh, how the film would benefit if it could rid itself of these literalities and story crutches as much as possible, if it let itself be carried away by its own greatest advantage, i.e., the smooth pulsating atmosphere of a psychedelically mad city, captured in an experimental film form, precisely fulfilling the thesis of the unity of content and form. In short, if the whole film were like its opening title sequences, in which the original content is injected into the viewer's veins in such a way that in the newly created psychotropic form, all forms of readability are distorted to such an extent that they become unreadable in exchange for pure enjoyment of colors, movement, and sound. (21.09.2015)

Gaspar Noé tried to make something like “2009: A Life Odyssey” in his typical psychedelic fashion. After the (very) decent start with the key plot twist, however, the film descends into boring, protracted and aimless flicking from one “before and after” episode to another, which doesn’t develop said key event in any way. It’s the same visually and narratively original style he used to spice up and enhance the story in Irréversible, but misused for self-serving pseudo-intellectual masturbation. (02.01.2011)