On Friday I took a 5:30am train to travel to London in order to see Gaspar Noe’s latest film, Enter the Void, screening as part of this year’s London Film Festival. As I stood outside the Vue cinema in Leicester Square a young man approached the box office and asked, quite confidently, for a ticket to see ‘Entering the Void’. I wondered if he couldn’t get the title right, if he knew quite what he was letting himself in for. Having now seen the film, it’s safe to say that it doesn’t matter how familiar you are with the film before going to see it for yourself – it’s impossible to know what you’re letting yourself in for.

Gaspar Noe introduced the film to us, and he was met with a great round of applause and cheering – which appeared to make him giggle, which instantly endeared him to me. He’s a scruffy, normal looking guy, who told us that the reason he wanted to make Enter the Void was because he wanted to put on the screen the kind of things he saw when he experimented with mushrooms and hallucinogenic drugs.
The lights went down and the credits began, and I will quite happily admit that it was worth all the time and money spent to go see this film just for those credits, but I suspect that might be something individual to my enjoyment of pretty colours and lettering. Regardless, that credit sequence brilliantly sets the tone for the rest of the film – incomprehensible, nauseating, brilliant. Noe, as ever, presents to his audience an incredible visual (and aural) experience.

It’s impossible to fully appreciate the film from one viewing. I can certainly find words to describe the film – baffling, mesmerizing, sickening, singular – but is it a good film? That’s harder to judge. For example, I can’t tell if Paz de la Huerta puts in an awful performance, or whether the way in which she behaves is due to the utterly subjective way in which we watch her actions: through the ‘eyes’ of her dead brother. Noe told us when he introduced the film to pay particular attention to the face of the woman in the film’s final scene in order to fully decipher the film’s meaning. Even having been given this explicit instruction, I still could not decipher the film’s ending.

On an initial viewing alone, it really is the film’s visuals that make it such an incredible experience. A spectator doesn’t watch this film – they’re assaulted by it. Throughout, and true to form, Noe visually and aurally batters his audience into submission, through his use of colour, lighting and camerawork. He makes extensive use of strobe effects throughout the film, which are, by the end of the film’s length running time, truly headache-inducing. I can’t help but think that if the film was just that little bit shorter, it would be a far superior work – however, I would have no suggestion as to which minutes to remove from the film and the impression I got from Noe is that he wouldn’t want to cut any more footage (having already cut 20 minutes since the film’s premiere at Cannes).
I’d recommend this film to anyone who’s interested in filmmaking as a craft, if they’re not a fan of Noe. It’s testament to his creativity and ballsy experimentation that Enter the Void is a film worth watching solely for its construction, never mind its (mostly) interesting storyline. It’s impossible to deny that Noe is one of – if not the – most innovative filmmakers around. I truly hope that Enter the Void gets a DVD release in the not too distant future, because it’s a film I plan on experiencing again and again.