Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void has enjoyed a great amount of success during its limited theatrical run, and is in fact still running at the IFC Center in NYC five months later. But American audiences haven’t seen the full thing! The French director’s cut actually runs a good 20 minutes longer.
Mild spoilers to follow for anyone who hasn’t seen the film yet.
Required to deliver a shorter version of ENTER THE VOID for international sale, Noé decided to excise an entire reel from his original cut, skipping over part of Oscar’s transition into the spirit world. In the restored footage “Oscar wakes up in the morgue and he thinks he’s alive but he’s dead,” Noé explains, “and his sister, his friends say, “No, man, you’re not you, you’re not Oscar. You’re a zombie.” He looks in the mirror and sees the face of his father instead of his own face and Alex says, “No, c’mon, man. You never came back to life. You’re dead, you’ve been cremated. You’re just dreaming that you’re alive. And then we go to that astral vision where he comes out from that urn where his ashes are inside his sister’s apartment and she throws his ashes into the sink and the camera gets into the sink. And that’s where we see some weird kind of insects…” Noé adds, “Actually, when I proposed that solution to the producers, they told me they thought it was never going to work.”
IFC will be releasing the French theatrical version at the IFC Center for one week only, January 14th through January 20th. It will play daily at 3:10pm and 8:40pm and an additional Friday and Saturday showing at 11:45pm.
The Landmark Nuart in LA will get it for a midnight showing on January 21st, as well, and this will be your last chance to see it in theaters before it hits DVD on the 26th via MPI Home Video.
The film made both Damon and Renn’s Top 15 of the year and really, don’t you want to see this in theaters?