Enter The Void- Review
This film was directed by Gaspar Noé, a French director who is infamously known here within this community for delivering tastefully disturbing films that aims to invade the personal space of each individual viewer and quite literally, blow their minds. I knew beforehand that this would be the find of film you'd have to mull over before even attempting to describe or talk about anything. It's trippy, uninviting and messy and that's partly due to the overpowering visual effects.
Unless you've actually seen this film, explaining it wouldn't do any good. There's barely any simple way to describe this film as it is a journey that you just have to sit and be patient with- to at least fathom something. However, one thing I can say is that this film works to describe that feeling of general nothingness and emptiness. It's not a situation of being numb, but more so just that complete lack of anything. I liked that concept in theory, but the execution seemed kind of poorly.
The performances in my honest and blunt opinion, don't really deserve much praise at all considering there wasn't anything special about them or worth mentioning. This is where I think the idea of nothingness comes back. Gaspar wants to try and make his characters seem empty but instead just makes them look boring and habitually uninteresting. Trying to connect with characters who have no personality is incredibly hard and ended up just leaving me wanting nothing to do with them. We are also introduced to the characters through a perspective view. This is an approach that I am not typically fond of.
This film relies very heavily on its audio and visual techniques. In all fairness, it was an incredible visual journey and for the first ten minutes, I really enjoyed feeling that psychedelic influence of colours and shapes but after that it just became boring. You cannot expect me to sit for 143 minutes watching the same tripe over and over again. If all the audio and visual techniques weren't present, you'd have a film looking in all corners for a slither of substance to grab on to. So that should describe every other element of this film. In typical European style, there's a lot of nudity in this film, particularly of a sexual nature- towards the end of the film. For a very prolonged scene, we watch something that is similar to that of the workings of New York City porn. I honestly felt like I was watching a pornographic film set in a Las Vegas casino hotel. Yes, we get it. We're all fertile beings with uncontrollable, animalistic desires and our job is to procreate. The end.
I was expecting a lot more and was left thoroughly disappointed, bored and detached. I'm not sure what Gaspar Noé's director vision was and I don't see what this film was trying to achieve. Despite it's astounding audio and visual techniques, it wasn't enough to save this film from falling short and giving everyone a goddamn headache.
Score: 4.5/10.