The Movie: A young American man living in Tokyo with his sister deals drugs to his fellow expatriates, but when he meets up with a friend at a club called The Void, a deal goes horribly wrong and he ends up being shot in the toilets by the police. Following the shooting, his disembodied consciousness traverses his past experiences while hovering over the city, observing the aftermath of the shooting and its effects on the various people in his life. What Makes It Original: Radical filmmaker Gaspar Noé takes the concept of an out of body experience to the extreme, using his camera as the viewpoint of the central character both in life and what may follow. Inspired by the "pure cinema" aesthetic of Stanley Kubrick, Enter the Void offers a visceral experience of near-hallucinatory imagery which takes the viewer on a trip into the subconscious unlike any other movie, as the camera swoops and hovers over a neon-drenched Tokyo, diving into seedy sex hotels and even inside a woman's body as she has sex. Noé's own labeling of the movie as a "psychedelic melodrama" falls short of just how unique Enter the Void is - as one critic observed, "This is what it feels like when a movie kicks you in the face."
