Have you ever been cornered by one of your friends who wants to tell you about this trippy dream they’d had? You mistakenly say yes and an hour or two later, that’s about an hour and forty minutes from the point when you stopped caring and just kept nodding your head, you find that you’ve just lost time you will never get back. That’s pretty much my experience with Enter The Void: The Full-Length Director’s Cut.

First off if your epileptic avoid this film at all costs. The opening credit sequence, while original and kind of cool looking, is horrific to look at. The font style of each word is a bombardment of different styles, colors, textures, all racing out at you at breakneck speed. Why they even bothered at all is beyond me since you only get flashes of words while having your eyes murdered by the flickering lights of it all. When the film begins its more color and light schemes inside of a neon Tokyo. The camera style is POV which is more controlled but still annoyingly bothersome as we move from one destination to another, especially once the main character goes through his transition. There are flashbacks, flash forwards, dream sequences, visuals inspired by a drug state, visceral states of nothingness. It’s basically the kitchen sink as far as visuals go and not all good. Ten plus  minute kaleidoscope drug vision with no dialogue? Unnecessary unless its one of those footnote moments where the director is trying to point out that they know about drug culture, which makes sense in the context of this film. However there are a multitude of moments in the film that are seemingly unnecessary, and considering the run time, makes the directors cut seem like more filler then anything.  

Take away all the out of body visualizations, drug states, flash backs, mostly featuring the same instance over and over, and you have somewhat of a coherent film. You take away those filler spots and what you get is a minimalistic tale that would work well for stage, which is heavily reliant on visual expressions to convey things we might miss otherwise, but in the end its just a concept without much meat to it. In other words quantity definitely does not equal quality here. Art scene kids will more then likely defend this film passionately about how its got depth and is a journey through life, death, and rebirth and contains conversation stimulators intertwined within its complex thought process. Whatever. It just felt like a film about drug addicts, for drug addicts, expanding on one of those really high moments where your so stupid high you start contemplating the meaning of life only you have the resources to share it with a world wide audience. Its absolutely not for everyone. As always though final judgment is yours.