Enter the Void

First published on 29 Jul 2010. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

Returning to the swirling camerawork, hallucinatory sense of real time and narrative maelstrom of sex, drugs and death that characterised his last feature, Irréversible (2002), Noé strives for greatness and even more notoriety with this epic, wild folly that transplants the same methods to modern Tokyo and its seedy expat scene. This is first-person cinema: we start in the head of Oscar (Brown), a young American living the backstreet life and whose blinking offers Noé a handy device for hiding his end-of-scene cuts. Not long into the film, Oscar, whose sister Linda (Huerta) has recently arrived from the US for a visit, suddenly dies while smoking the potent drug DMT. Noé’s camera then takes its cue from a handily placed copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead and floats above his body for the rest of the film: this is truly soulful film-making. The camera hovers for the next two hours, taking ones patience to the edge of madness, darting in and out of buildings, visiting Oscar’s troubled childhood, creepily lapping up his sister’s naked body, revealing the after-effects of his death, and even embarking on an episode of reincarnation. Or, you wonder, is this just a bad drugs trip that Noé is trying to recreate? That would, at least, explain the frequent recourse to digitally animated spirals, fractals and other druggy patterns. Dave Calhoun