With each film, director Gaspar Noe aims to provoke, disorient, and even violate the viewer in some way; as a result, one gets the impression that he invites the vitriol of those who would slam his cinematic vision. Now, while I was compelled (if not "entertained") by the near-pornographic subjectivity of Noe's "I Stand Alone" (the tale of a sociopath butcher wandering around France with a whole lot of pent-up anger) and "Irreversible" (a backwards-unraveling tale of revenge and rape), "Enter the Void" is an agonizingly overlong tale of death and the Afterlife that mistakes neon-saturated, drug-trip informed imagery as a profound comment on a world beyond our own mortality. In its first half, "Void" manages to compel and intrigue, even if our grating and unsympathetic protagonists (a brother-and-sister duo living in Japan as a drug dealer and a stripper, respectively) do very little to make all the flashy neon seem like more than aesthetic window-dressing. At 90 minutes, "Void" is a passable (if largely empty) film, but as it crawls towards the 3-hour mark, it becomes obnoxious, intolerable, and infuriating (with Noe's pretentious excesses -- culminating in a literal orgy -- becoming the stuff of yawns rather than gasps).
Review of Enter the Void
