Enter The Void

Director: Gaspar Noé

Country: France

Synopsis: Noe describes the film as “The universal melodrama of a young man who, after the brutal death of his parents, promises that he will protect his little sister no matter what… Sensing that he himself is dying, he fights desperately to keep his promise.”

Round-Up: "Comprised of continuous digital effects, psychedelic visuals, ambient electronic music, and saturated colors, 'Enter The Void' is a fascinating cinematic experience to take in on a big screen. For more than half of its two hours and forty minutes, it was among the most striking and compelling films I’ve seen in some time" wrote indieWIRE's Eugene Hernandez following its premiere at Cannes. Daniel Kasman, writing for the Auteurs Notebook, calls it "the only avant-garde film in Cannes’ Competition" and describes it as "an experiment in visualization, of taking conventional ideas of focalization in dramatic cinema—what perspective a story is told from—which usually lurk quasi-invisibility under the surface of storytelling, and flips the emphasis on its head. Instead of seeing a story visualized, we see the visualization of a story." The New York Times' Manohla Dargis praises the film mightily, calling it "an exceptional work, though less because of its story, acting or any of the usual critical markers. What largely distinguishes it, beyond the stunning cinematography, is that this is the work of an artist who's trying to show us something we haven't seen before, even while he liberally samples images and ideas from Stanley Kubrick and the entirety of American avant-garde cinema." Echoing what the aforementioned reviewers have noted, Screen Daily's Mike Goodridge describes the film as "a wild, hallucinatory mindfuck for adults... More experience than narrative, it runs to a massive 163 minutes, meandering and careening in and out of story and into visual realms and moods that are nothing short of hypnotic. It is a film that will instantly achieve cult status among young adults." While Eric Kohn, writing for Moving Pictures Magazine, goes as far as to say the film up's "Antichrist" controversial ante: "Beyond its unique construction, "Enter the Void" also functions as a dedicated provocation. With loads of graphic sex and even an onscreen abortion, the movie led many in its Cannes audiences to suggest that it ups Lars von Trier's "Antichrist" as the most controversial entry at the festival. Maybe, but it's the core idea of the production - death as the ultimate drug trip - that ought to take the spotlight."