Sightlines · reception
How Enter the Void was received
2010 · Gaspar Noé · Enter the Void on Sightlines
The arc
Booed and walked out on at its unfinished 2009 Cannes premiere and dismissed by many critics as an exhausting provocation, it has since become a fixture of the 'trip film' canon — the movie a generation of stoned cinephiles passed around like contraband.
What’s debated
The forever fight: is it a genuinely transcendent sensory experience or 160 minutes of style-over-substance edgelord excess — with the runtime itself a recurring flashpoint.
Its footprint
Its strobing neon title sequence is one of the most imitated credits ever — Kanye West's 'All of the Lights' video was widely accused of lifting it, which Noé himself publicly noted — and its glowing-Tokyo drift shots seeded a decade of music-video and vaporwave aesthetics.
Where it stands
A cult object and Letterboxd rite of passage: the 'watch it loud, in the dark, once' film that people rate five stars or one star and almost nothing in between.
Did you know? The version that premiered at Cannes 2009 was an unfinished cut — Noé was still completing the effects — and he kept re-editing afterward, so different territories saw different lengths of the film.
Named by the director
- Lady in the Lake (1947) — Noé repeatedly said Robert Montgomery's all-POV experiment planted the decades-old idea of making an entire film from a first-person perspective.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — Noé cited seeing Kubrick's film as a child as the origin of his wish to make a psychedelic, consciousness-altering movie — the ambition Enter the Void chases directly.
- Kenneth Anger — Noé pointed to Anger's experimental psychedelic films as a touchstone for the movie's hallucinatory light-and-color passages.