Kick-ass opening credits for Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void

Imagine sitting in the front row, facing the big white screen, then there’s total darkness, accompanied by total silence… All of a sudden, you get hit by these opening credits => Head explosion.

Enter The Void (2010) by Gaspar Noé

Gaspar Noé describes the subject of the film as “the sentimentality of mammals and the shimmering vacuity of the human experience… It’s the story of someone who is stoned when he gets shot and who has an intonation of his own dream.”

Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian calls it “a grandiose hallucinatory journey into, and out of, hell.”

Enter the Void feels like a drug-induced dream: it kicks off with mind-blowing opening credits that give you a huge head rush — the film has barely started that your head’s already exploded—, then you quickly get treated with a series of pretty psychedelic images and as soon as Oscar gets shot and starts his out-of-body experience, you embark on a long ride across neon-lit Tokyo’s dreamscape.  The trip gets occasionally interrupted by horrifying bursts of car-crash flashbacks;  they come without warning and make your heart skip a beat. The whole trip is aggressive, exhausting, addictive, and you come out of it dazed, confused and molecularly re-arranged.

At 157 minutes (last night’s version shown at the Curzon Soho was one of the longer cuts available), it’s a tad too long and I think I drifted off here and there but only because my brain needed the occasional break from sensory overload.

Trippy & Vertiginous, this “psychedelic melodrama” (Noé’s words) is one of the richest cinematic experiences I’ve had and one that cannot be fully appreciated unless it’s on the big screen — front row, please.

Side note: Marc Caro worked as the supervisor of set designs in Tokyo.

Tag: Tokyo + Drugs + Ghost + Gaspar Noé = !@£$£@!!***&$@!!!!£$$***&^%$£@!!!!!?><><>FUUUUUUU