(2009, English with untranslated Japanese) Enter (opening credits flash and vibrate like a neon-light show) through the eyes of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown) as his younger sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta) leaves for her job as a stripper at the Sex Money Power club in Tokyo before he lights up - repeatedly telling himself, "I know I'm not a junkie" - and relaxes with a pipe of DMT (Dimethyltryptamine, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound), obtained from Bruno (Ed Spear), tripping through hallucinations of kaleidoscopic imagery and an out-of-body experience.

His cellphone rings: Victor (Olly Alexander) calling, requesting Oscar bring his share to the Void. After what happened with his mother, Victor won't come over to Oscar's place. Disoriented inside his own maze of amazing sights and sounds, Oscar gets up to depart when Alex (Cyril Roy) knocks at the door, asking if he's read The Tibetan Book of the Dead he'd loaned Oscar.

As they head together for the Void, Alex summarizes the text: at death the spirit departs the body, goes through the magic mirror, allowing it to see and hear others but not permitted communication, and continues forever and ever until the cycle is broken. "The only way out is to get reincarnated," explains Alex, but if the spirit takes a bad trip into the nether realms: "You wish you'd never died."

Discussing recreational drugs - if you overcome your fears, with LSD take your hallucinations wherever you want - Alex tells Oscar that DMT, which only lasts six minutes but feels like an eternity, is the same chemical one experiences during death.

While Alex waits outside, Oscar enters The Void where he finds Victor has set him up. In his attempt to flee the cops, Oscar locks himself inside a toilet stall, where he flushes away the drugs while yelling he has a gun; the police shoot through the door, hitting Oscar once in the chest. Initially thinking he's still tripping - "I don't want to die like this" - his body slumps as his spirit rises above the scene.

Death is pretty trippy with bright light accompanied by ringing and warbling tones. Watching from above, Oscar follows Alex running off after hearing that his friend's been killed and calling Linda, leaving a message about Oscar on her cellphone while she's engaged in sex with Mario (Masato Tanno), the only significant Japanese character, at the club.

Flashing back to his childhood with his sister: in the backseat of the car when their parents were killed in a head-on car crash; the pact between them never to leave each other, yet raised in separate foster homes; earning money in Japan selling drugs to buy an airline ticket to bring Linda to be with him again.

Alternating between memories and the aftermath at the morgue and the crematorium, penetrating his own wound, his energy flowing from one orifice of place and time into another, followed by Linda's pregnancy and abortion - whooshing, pulsating, spinning through a brilliantly chromatic, psychedelic amusement-park of scenes both horrible and enlightening - finally arriving at a Boschian depiction of nirvana at the Love Hotel, Oscar eventually enters his sister's dreams and uterus.

As if we'd consumed the hallucinogenic datura stramonium, for 2 hours and 41 minutes, director Gaspar Noé - screenplay co-written with Lucile Hadzihalilovic - takes us on a tortuous, often tedious, exploration of death and rebirth.

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Copyright © 2011 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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