Enter the Void - Film Review

        "Death is the ultimate trip", and with that we find a foundation for Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, a film exploring the afterlife and Tokyo through recently departed Oscar. The visual elements of the film push us through a journey best described as bizarre and leave one feeling as if they have taken one of the psychedelic drugs are protagonist pushes.
DMT, LSD, and ecstasy are among the several drugs that are main character uses as well as distributes.  Noe is able to give a glimpse to the dark side of the Japanese culture that is rarely seen in film.  Oscar's search for the ultimate high has come across The Tibetan Book of the Dead and as his accomplice Alex is able to explain that death is the ultimate rush.  Soon after, Oscar is shot by police and begins a metaphysical journey of out of body experience combined with a life flashing before your eyes scenario that correlates to The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
A film aimed at targeting independent film followers, Noe shoots the film entirely in the POV of Oscar.  A risky move that helps serve the psychedelic nature of the highs giving the audience a taste of the character's hallucinations.  This POV film is so off the beaten path that it is hard to sell a film like this to mainstream audiences. There is about a 5-minute DMT trip that the viewers will sit through and that is in the opening of the film.
Noe also wrote the screenplay with the help of Lucille Hadzihalilovic and in interviews mentioned a drug riddled path.  It seeps through in the work.  The actors deliver a performance that brings a sense of reality to what is usually aggrandized somewhere between sheik and gangster.  Although those elements come through in small portions the sense of aimless youth is captured well with conversations that jump from philosophical discussions on death, to the petty squabbles of friends and family, to what drug were they going to partake in next.
Death, is a universal subject matter and universal is a befitting description for a French filmmaker to shoot a movie set in Japan with an American protagonist.  An exploration of the soul and of the life after, Enter the Void, leaves a void in the viewers that will require some of their own soul searching.