Enter the Void is a 2009 psychedelic masterpiece of cinema from Chilean director Gaspar Noé, whose boundary-pushing cinema has delighted fans of celluloid’s darker side. Noé was the man responsible for Irreversible, the difficult to watch mystery, that plays out in reverse, the erotically charged Love and his latest masterpiece, Vortex, about an elderly couple living with dementia and starring Italian horror/giallo master Dario Argento in an acting role for the first time. Enter the Void fits somewhere into his mid-period where he didn’t just break boundaries, he shattered them. 

Enter the Void tells the story of Oscar (a debut performance from Nathaniel Brown; Boys on Film, Druid Peak and Blinders) a heavy drug user and sometime dealer living in Tokyo with his stripper sister, Linda (Paz De La Huerta; The Cider House Rules, Nurse, and A Walk to Remember). Oscar has been reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and after he is shot and killed by police in a public toilet while trying to flush his drugs away, he finds himself floating above the city he knows so well, watching the experiences of his sister and his friends, whilst he adjusts to the Chonyid Bardo (the intervening state that exists between life and death) before he moves on to the final state, the bardo of rebirth or Sidpa Bardo. 

Stylistically, Enter the Void uses POV camera effects prior to Oscar’s death that are not unlike Jonas Åkerlund's work on The Prodigy’s "Smack my Bitch Up" promotional video, this changes after his death to a floating camera that looks down on whatever is going on, on-screen, to give the impression that Oscar is able to float around watching his friends and family in the aftermath of his death. We also get a host of flashbacks that tell us how Oscar and Linda’s lives had progressed from childhood and how they came to live in Tokyo. As with Irreversible, Enter the Void features graphic scenes of sex and violence and drug use, but as with that film, it feels necessary when telling the story of Oscar and those around him to show these aspects in such a way. Noé is a master with the camera and the hallucinogenic effects used throughout to depict not only drug use, but the seedy, neon side of Tokyo life is superb. I’ve heard it said that Noé felt that not enough film-makers had effectively put the psychedelic experience on screen and wanted to put his own experiences up there for all to see. 

As with much of Gaspar Noé’s work, Enter the Void is a challenging slice of cinematic art, from a  technical standpoint it is a very creative experience but its themes and imagery are challenging to say the least. That said, Noé is among the finest directors working in the world today when it comes to dark and worthy cinema and Enter the Void is among his best work. This new limited edition Blu-ray from Arrow Video comes packed with bonus materials, but even more importantly we are given both the theatrical release of the film and the director’s cut. For the purpose of this review, I chose to watch the director’s cut as it is the version Noé is most happy with. The set also comes complete with a double-sided poster and six postcard-sized art cards.

Overall, a lavishly packaged set for a masterpiece of psychedelic cinema. Enter the Void is not for everyone, much like Noé’s other work, it’s a difficult watch, but I found it a more than a worthwhile entry in the field of psychedelic cinema.