ENTER THE VOID, the psychedelic thriller by visionary French maverick Gaspar Noé (IRREVERSIBLE, I STAND ALONE), is a cinematic thrill ride that's riveted audiences at the Cannes, Toronto, Sundance and SXSW film festivals. Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta star in a visceral journey set against the thumping, neon club scene of Tokyo, which hurls the viewer into an astonishing trip through life, death, and the universally wonderful and horrible moments between. An immersive and just plain mind-bending experience
Leave it to Gaspar Noé to give us the Afterlife: Xtreme Edition. The French director of 2002’s “Irreversible,’’ which took moviegoers on a hellish backward journey through murder, rape, and fragile innocence, now pushes forward across the dividing line of existence into a hyper-poetic head trip of degradation and rebirth. “Enter the Void’’ is most assuredly not for pregnant women, the seizure-prone, or the faint of heart. Yet as chowderheaded as some of its underlying pretensions are, the movie’s still an astonishing work of cinema, alternately brilliant and disgusting, naïve and inspired, tedious and sublime. No one else could have made it. No one else would have wanted to.
Two-and-a-half hours in length, “Enter the Void’’ is told entirely from the vantage point of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a young American druggie living in Tokyo. We see what he sees: his tiny high-rise apartment and the beckoning neon purgatory beyond his balcony; the glass pipe that delivers his hit of DMT; the ravishing fractal vortex of hallucinations that follow; his pale face in the mirror.
