Patron Pick – Enter the Void

This special reward is available to Patreon patrons who pledge at the $10 or $20 monthly levels. Each month, those patrons will pick a film for me to review. If they choose, they also get to include some of their thoughts about the movie. This Pick comes from Matt Harris.

Enter the Void (2009)
Written by Gaspar Noé and Lucile Hadzihalilovic
Directed by Gaspar Noé

No one knows what happens when we die. There has undoubtedly been a lot of time devoted to thinking about death. Some people claim they know through various intense near-death experiences, but we don’t really. One of the biggest questions that surrounds death is what happens to the conscious mind. In sleep, we dream. But where does that mind go when there is no body to return to? The easiest answer would be, “Remember what it was like before you were born.” That’s what death is like. Nothing.

From a neurological perspective, researchers have observed an increase in highly organized gamma waves in the brain linked to functions like memory, cognition, and attention. So, our brains appear to become highly active just as we die. My personal hope is that the chemicals released in our brains cause our minds to never comprehend that we are dead. Instead, we float in a psychedelic cradle in seconds that feel to us as if they are an eternity. One last loving gift from our mind & body that has carried us through so much.

Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) lives in Tokyo with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). They have vowed to stay together following the deaths of their parents during the siblings’ childhood. Where they are at is not great. Oscar has started dealing drugs while Linda works as a stripper for a very handsy boss. One night, Oscar smokes some DMT and begins to have vivid hallucinations of geometrical shapes. He’s interrupted when his friend Victor calls and wants to meet him for a deal at The Void bar. Oscar heads over with his other friend, Alex, but finds the whole thing was a police sting. While flushing the drugs down the bar toilet, police bang on the locked door. Oscar tells them he has a gun. A shot is fired. Oscar looks down to see his chest blown open. He collapses. He dies. The movie begins.

Enter the Void is another mind-blowing work from French filmmaker Gaspar Noé, whose films honestly frighten me a bit. I haven’t actively sought out many movies because they seem very vividly intense from what I have seen and heard. In fact, I’ve only ever seen Climax, which I thought was pretty good. I know much about his other infamous films and have seen several clips. They leave me with this not-great feeling in my chest, so I have intentionally overlooked them. But the patrons get to choose, so I finally watched Enter the Void, a film I have heard great and horrible things about.

I think it is a masterfully made experimental film that covers a topic in depth in a way we’ve never seen before. Death is not the comic setting of Defend Your Life or the body-swapping antics of Warren Beatty’s Heaven Can Wait. This is death seen through a DMT haze and informed by the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Noé was informed by a psilocybin trip he had in his early twenties during which he saw Lady in the Lake, a 1947 film shot in first person perspective. Noé decided that if he ever made a film about the afterlife, he wanted to film it similarly, and here we have it. 

While this film is about death, it is also about the cinematic experience. Noé is hyper-aware of how the audience takes in a movie. One of the reasons he cast English-speaking actors was because he knew that most of the audience who would see this film would already know English, so they wouldn’t be so fixated on subtitles. The image would dominate the screen. Noé doesn’t see this as a depiction of what happens when someone dies, but what goes through the mind of someone on DMT at the moment of their death. He also alluded to the fact that Oscar’s life could be about to begin all over again, that the human brain’s perception might allow for such an experience.

Enter the Void is a film that divided audiences from the outset. I remember one of my roommates (a film nerd like me) had seen it and said he was disappointed. He had found Noé’s previous film, Irreversible, much better. I have yet to see that film; perhaps I will one day, but the subject matter and the intensity I’ve seen from clips have me a bit leery. I can see why someone might not enjoy Enter the Void. It is over two hours long and relatively slow-paced. I found the pacing to be exactly what the story needed. We spent much time floating in the sky, looking down, and panning across Tokyo to see what one acquaintance was doing and then another. There’s a story being built as we work through Oscar’s life, but Noé also folds in the ideas of the bardos (waiting rooms) from Buddhism.

My takeaway is that this film is about the sadness of being alive. Noé acknowledges the beauty, but he shows us how it’s accompanied by so many sad moments, which linger with us the longest. Oscar’s memory of the car crash that killed their parents is constantly revisited with more detail in every pass. The anguished cries of little Linda pierce through him and us. That was when a scar was worn across their lives that has colored everything since. Trauma ripples through Oscar’s odyssey.

You will probably experience every emotion watching this movie, which tracks as it is about the experience of a person’s entire life. Tears come easily with the death of the children’s parents and young Linda’s anguished cries to not be taken away from her beloved brother. There’s intense discomfort when they are reunited, and Linda clearly has sexual feelings towards her brother. It’s been fairly well-documented that some people do have a bizarre melange of emotions when they are reunited with a family member, their brain trying to differentiate between sex and love. 

Because of Linda’s profession, Oscar witnesses her dancing nude on stage & having sex with her boss, all while floating above. He’s also there in the doctor’s office when she has an abortion, and Noé even zooms in on the aborted fetus, Oscar looking at this collection of cells as he continues passing into death. There’s a starkness here, and I won’t pretend Noé isn’t trying to be provocative. He’s undoubtedly trying to elicit a reaction from his audience. 

I chose not to be baited; these days, it’s hard for me to be morally outraged by art when compared to what happens in the material world around us by human hands. Instead, I chose to view this as the veil of society and decorum being removed. If, in death, we do see the entirety of our lives and the world without boundaries, then we’re going to see some uncomfortable things. Yet, if I’m discorporated, it will matter even less than it did in life.  Humans fuck. Humans cry. Humans fight. Humans betray each other. We can pretend they don’t, but it happens all the time.

Life is truly the most horrific experience we could imagine because it is ultimately the only one we are capable of imagining with such vividness. As someone who has benefited from using psilocybin and LSD, I felt the film did a good job of capturing the floaty, disconnected feel of the peaks of those trips. You unpack many emotions and do a tremendous amount of reflection. I’ve never done DMT, but with the right information and a quality product, I would not be opposed to it. I think it is important to engage with death and the death experience now in the same way you might prepare for a test, a wedding, or any other important event in your life that takes you to the next stage. Death is something you are going to experience, so you might as well learn as much as you can about it.

So much of Enter the Void is beyond what can be explained in a review. This is a truly cinematic experience, love or hate it, and it has to be viewed to form your opinion. I think while Gaspar Noé is certainly a provocateur, he’s also an exceptional filmmaker. He pushes boundaries of how a scene can be framed, from whose perspective a moment can be captured, and he makes us sit through uncomfortable sequences. The more I have thought about Enter the Void since I saw it, the more I like it. We are rarely presented with cinema that so thoroughly shakes us up and provides an image unlike anything we’ve seen before.