A word of warning: is not passive entertainment. It is 161 minutes long (the director’s cut runs 142 minutes; the original European cut is 161). It requires a dark room, a good sound system, and a sober—or carefully curated—state of mind. Do not watch it on a laptop on an airplane. Do not watch it while tired or prone to motion sickness.
There are movies you watch. And then there are movies that happen to you .
The plot is deceptively simple. Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) is a young American drug dealer living in Tokyo with his sister, Linda (Paz de la Huerta). An avid reader of The Tibetan Book of the Dead , Oscar espouses a philosophy that death is merely a transition, a hallucination where the soul frantically seeks a new vessel to inhabit. His theories are put to the test when a drug deal goes wrong, and he is gunned down by police in a dingy bathroom. enter the void -2009-
From this floating, ghost-like perspective, the audience drifts through walls, ceilings, and memories. Oscar revisits his childhood trauma (the death of his parents in a car crash), observes his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) spiraling into grief and stripping, and watches his friends attempt to flee the yakuza. The film’s famous tagline—“The most powerful hallucinogen is death”—drives every pulsating, strobe-lit frame.
Have you experienced Gaspar Noé’s psychedelic epic? Share your thoughts below, and for more deep dives into transgressive cinema, subscribe to our newsletter. A word of warning: is not passive entertainment
Just remember to breathe.
In the sprawling landscape of experimental cinema, few films demand as much from their audience as Gaspar Noé’s 2009 metaphysical shocker, . More than just a movie, it is an experience—a relentless, sensory-overloaded, first-person odyssey that blurs the line between the living and the dead. For those who have seen it, the title evokes a specific, unsettling trance; for those who haven’t, Enter the Void -2009- remains a legendary pillar of avant-garde transgressive art. Do not watch it on a laptop on an airplane
Noé uses the camera not just to see, but to remember . As Oscar floats toward the light (a recurring, terrifyingly bright white void), his mind flashes back to his childhood, his parents’ death, and the incestuous boundaries of his relationship with his sister.
If you haven’t seen Enter the Void , you have no reference for its visual language. Noé famously shot the entire film from a first-person POV, but not like a video game. The camera hovers, swoops through walls, zooms across the city skyline, and peers into the windows of strangers.
During a police bust in a sleazy nightclub called “The Void,” Oscar is shot dead in a bathroom. That happens within the first twenty minutes. The remaining two-and-a-half hours of the film take place in Oscar’s disembodied consciousness as his soul—or his “DMT-infused dying brain”—floats above the streets of Tokyo.