Cinema RITCS : Enter the Void

Cinema RITCS : Enter the Void

23/02 @ 19h00

It has been eight years now since Gaspar Noé released his notorious rape-revenge film Irréversible, an ultra-violent, ultra-extreme movie that effortlessly exceeded in shock value anything, by anyone, at any time. I myself, having admired his previous feature, Seul Contre Tous, reacted fiercely against it as a piece of macho provocation. Rereading my review now, I find none of its points wrong exactly, but I have to concede the possibility that I was just freaked out in precisely the way Noé intended. Having staggered out of the auditorium, my eyeballs still vibrating from the director's trademark sado-stroboscopic white light display, I may well have succumbed to a convulsion of disapproval.

Enter the Void is, in its way, just as provocative, just as extreme, just as mad, just as much of an outrageous ordeal: it arrives here slightly re-edited from the version first shown at Cannes. But despite its querulous melodrama and crazed Freudian pedantries, it has a human purpose the previous film lacked, and its sheer deranged brilliance is magnificent. This is a grandiose hallucinatory journey into, and out of, hell: drugged, neon-lit and with a fully realised nightmare-porn aesthetic that has to be seen to be believed. Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible. It has obvious debts, but Enter the Void is utterly original film-making, and Noé is a virtuoso of camera movement.

[...]

Some may find Enter the Void detestable and objectionable, though if they affect to find it "boring" I will not believe them. For all its hysterical excess, this beautiful, delirious, shocking film is the one offering us that lightning bolt of terror or inspiration that we hope for at the cinema.

Cinema RITCS
Peter Bradshaw for The Guardian

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