DVD: Enter the Void

It always amazes me that so many commentators dismiss drug experiences as somehow puerile, irrelevant, or even immature. Of course they can be all three but they're also integrally wrapped up in being human, in one's body, alive, so they can also be very much else.

Gaspar Noé's film gets this, drawing a direct line, as Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and shamen for millennia before them did, between psychedelic drugs and the process of dying. Enter the Void undoubtedly drags, becoming increasingly turgid during the last quarter of its two hours and 41 minutes, but it aims so much higher than most films that it would be missing the point to focus on this.

The plot follows Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), a drug-loving drug-dealer based in Tokyo, whose death - or not - at the hands of the police precipitates the film's main action as the camera's view becomes his disembodied presence, watching his own life story and floating about the neon-lit city observing - or fantasising about - events that occur after he's gone. Like Irreversible, Noé's international breakthrough, Enter the Void courts controversy at every turn, visually revelling in endless humping and the hypersexualised wrongness implicit in Oscar's genuinely loving relationship with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta).

It's also visually groundbreaking, an onslaught of stroboscobic effects and retina-blistering lysergic visuals that could hold its own beside a Chemical Brothers concert. At one level, then, this is watchable purely as a naughty all-nighter treat, such as The Scala - that Mecca of artsy B-movie trash - might once have shown. However, at another, it runs much deeper, especially when we're finally shown "THE VOID" at the film's conclusion. Like Psych-Out or Jacob's Ladder before it, Enter the Void will likely be relegated to the cultural backwater of drug flicks but, also like those films, there's much being intelligently contemplated here that's worth chewing over.

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Watch the trailer for Enter the Void