Good start, but then it gets ruined

Best movie ever!

A Brilliant Conflict

A film with more than the usual spoiler issues. Talking about it in any detail feels akin to handing you a gift-wrapped present and saying, "I hope you like it -- It's a thriller about a diabolical secret experiment."

For more than 90 minutes, I flirted with the idea of giving "Enter The Void" the first perfect 10 on this site that I would have ever given to a movie (I have rated some specific TV episodes "10"). Words simply cannot describe the experience: it is astonishing, immersive, transcendental - a "legal high". Gaspar Noe's floating camera is like a magic carpet carrying you along. But around the point where the flashbacks chronicling Oscar's past end, the film starts to get a little too indulgent, and I could see the ending coming a mile away. Despite all that, a trip like no other. *** out of 4.

So i've never seen a Gasper Noe film, Irreversible turned me off because, surprise!, the 9 minute rape scene. Either way I wanted to check the talked about director out, despite some of the controversy and criticism of his "brutal" work. Well, I probably should have listened to the critics. This movie was striking at first, before wandering into an indulgent, redundant orgy of traumatic childhood memories and... literal orgies. I understand the artistic nature of the film, but I don't think it ever justified a 2 hours and 40 minute run time.

I'm giving it a 7 only because I'm crazy for the editing, music, and message.The movie itself got very repetitive with 15 minutes dedicated at the end to watching people have sex, and that's it.Besides that, the majority of the time you're just hearing the main character's sister whine and cry, that's it. Granted, she has a terrible life and plenty of reason to cry but the run of the movie has this tendency to show you the same scenes multiple times. If we were saved from watching rerun sex-scenes and their parents die (4+ times) the movie would be about 1/3 of its actual run time.*spoiler* He likes to watch his sister have A LOT of sex (when she's not crying, she's banging), I wouldn't be spending my afterlife like that but that's just me.

What can I say about this epic film, Gasper Noe's magnum opus. This is perhaps the most physically exhausting film I have ever seen. A film that you have to prepare yourself to watch, that leaves you feeling empty and drained by it's conclusion. This is typical Noe, just on the grandest, most ambitious scale yet. The intimacy(for lack of a better word) of irreversible or I stand alone is to a degree lost in the grandeur of this film. It is loosely based on the Tibetan book of the dead, as hinted to quite inelegantly near the start of the film. The plot is quite simple, after our protagonist/antagonist is killed we follow his soul through a pov camera and see flashbacks and mainly how his friends and relatives continue with their life after his death. This film is in essence a trip, and a character study. And the characters are fascinating, self destructive, manipulative wrecks that still demand my attention and empathy. As a trip though this film is exceptional. Filled with a typically Noe color scheme, aggressive neon lighting and a camera that goes everywhere along with some of the most disorientating visual intricacies, the film becomes a sensory overload. If there is one thing more important than anything else to Noe, it is excess. This film not only depicts excess but jumps head first into said excesses. A film that runs for almost 3 hours, were the camera flies around the city at breakneck speed and enters peoples bodies, a film that will indulge itself in the debaucherous acts of the characters and then revel in the consequences and dance on their proverbial graves. The metaphysics of the film are strange, with weird Freudian flights of fancy and a very nihilistic view of death, that doesn't deal with what happens after you die but how life on earth continues without ever missing a beat, not a piece of religious cinema or a film denouncing religion, just one that deals with the aftermath of death in an incredibly bleak and unblinking manner. Having said that though, I think the metaphysics are flawed, and the film gets bogged down by its ambition sometimes. However, I don't think that matters, this film is about a visceral experience for the viewer and in that respect it doesn't disappoint.Noe is a filmmaker with no filter, he has produced a film so ambitious and limitless it is almost a miracle it was made at all. So lets be grateful that such a ambitious, masterful piece of cinema has been created and that we can rest assured that auteurs like Noe continue to produce cinema that provoke reactions and thought from audiences willing to give them time.