Enter The Void by Gaspar Noé

It all starts behind a throbbing sound environment, with a dark design of bursting lighting’s going into dazzling vortices, plus many flashing lights, following the frantic and schizophrenic rhythm of the song “Freak” by LFO, each of the credits show up combining different fonts and including Western and Japanese kanji characters.

Enter the Void is a psychedelic thriller that features Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), who lives in Tokyo, Japan.

Oscar was looking for a way to bring his sister from America to Japan, so he started selling (and consuming) different drugs to get the money needed, until one day he stumbled upon DMT (Dimetiltriptamina), which is a substance produced by the human body naturally when we are born, when we dream and when we die.

The interesting thing about the film is the view that is featured by its main figure, as we see everything through his eyes. There is a bar called The Void, where Oscar was going to make a deal, but the buyer had set him up, denouncing him to the police.

After moments of tension and being trapped in a bathroom, Oscar starts screaming that he has a gun and then he’s shot by the police. He’s spirit fleets of the city, a restless ghost who cannot or doesn’t want to leave, looking at his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) an erotic dancer who is now completely and utterly alone in the world.

The film is directed by Gaspar Noé, one of the few directors who are really trying to do something new with the cinema, battling the limits of the possible; his unhinged brilliance is superb. This film is an amazing hallucinatory journey in and out of hell: a drugged trip, with lots of neon lights and with a persistent sexual note that’s aesthetically amazing, it has to be seen to be believed.

Enter the Void is about life after death. Specifically, it is about life after death that bothers us all, after leaving those loved ones in this busy and unhappy world, to continue on after our deaths.

This film production is not for any audience, some will find it detestable and questionable, although if they happen to find it “boring” I wouldn’t believe them. For its relentless pace, its psychedelic colors, its uniqueness in showing the raw life and still so how everything evolves after death; being a representation of our “soul” after disembodied, Enter the Void is a masterpiece that will captivate and open the horizons of many, especially those who fail to understand the depth of the work of Gaspar Noé.