ANDREW GLUM
Arts Writer

Gasper Noé’s Enter the Void is filmed entirely from the subjective perspective of its main character Oscar, even after he’s shot dead 20 minutes into the film.

This highly subjective form is the most profound element of the film. The level of abstraction is beyond simply following the events and emotions surrounding Oscar; the viewer is actually inside Oscar’s head, seeing out from his eyes and hearing his thoughts. It took me a few minutes to realize that the main character was not simply holding a damaged camera, but that the strange flickering to black every few seconds was actually Oscar blinking.

After Oscar is killed, the remaining two hours of the film present Oscar’s afterlife, loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The viewer is still seeing out from Oscar’s eyes, although he is now mute (and no longer blinking). This exploration of the afterlife, coupled with the stream-of-consciousness visual form make for a truly awe-inspiring experience.

Even the opening credits are impressive. While I have lost a lot of respect for Quentin Tarantino because of his newer works, I agree with his statement that Enter the Void has “hands down best credit scene of the year… Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.”

I went from impressed during the credits to awestruck within the first five minutes and my jaw remained dropped for most of the film.

Few films are flawless and Enter the Void is no exception. One of the film’s shortfalls is the acting. Like its director, the film’s two leads, Nathaniel Brown, who plays Oscar, and Paz de la Huerta as his sister Linda, are relatively unknown and, in my view, their performances here are weak.

Another failure is the running time. While I was never bored, I felt Noé could have made Void more powerful by being more concise, perhaps by cutting out some of the many scenes of ethereal Oscar flying through the city.
My only other complaint might just be a matter of personal taste.

The film returns many times to a car crash which killed Oscar’s parents, but which he and his sister survived when he was very young. While I understand the need to revisit this tragedy multiple times in order to emphasize its massive effect on Oscar’s and Linda’s lives, I feel that the last time Noé returns to this scene, it is too gratuitous and sickening.

Even with these faults, Enter the Void is one of the better films I’ve seen in the last five years, and certainly better than 99 per cent of what mainstream Hollywood has produced in the last five years. Its combination of a never-before-seen visual form (at least I’ve never seen it) with content which explores all of the beauty and ugliness of the afterlife make it well worth the time and money.