IFC Picks Up Gaspar Noé’s ‘Enter The Void’

OK, because we have 2010 films on the brain — yes, we still have a few more Most Anticipated Films of 2010 pieces hitting this week — we were just wondering about Gaspar Noé’s experimental surrealist, mindbender “Enter The Void.” The picture is about a drug-dealing teen who is killed in Japan, then reappears as a ghost to watch over his sister. The picture played at Cannes in 2009 to very mixed reviews. Most critics thought the film was self-indulgent trash and the rare critic — like the A/V Club’s Mike D’Angelo — thought it was a masterpiece of experimental cinema.

Well, despite its shaky reception, the divisive film has been picked up by IFC Films, which is pretty great news because it’s almost 3 hours long, reportedly was not trimmed in length and had played several festivals in hopes of being picked up with no one actually biting until now (honestly, we were a bit worried it was never coming out). The challenging-sounding picture will be released via IFC’s IN Theaters theatrical and VOD day-and-date platform, but to us it sounds like something you need to see on the big screen if you can.

We’re very curious still, but our own TIFF contributor Sam Mac saw it in Toronto this year and he loathed it writing that ultimately, “Noe pushes and pushes for us to give up on his film, as it follows one strange, ill-informed tangent after another. And, eventually, we do just that.”

And we must say, Mac generally has a high tolerance for arty and experimental cinema so that doesn’t exactly bode well. In fact, we totally trust him, yet since we’re suckers for punishment, we’ll go see it because… well, it just sounds too damn crazy not to. But we may bring a pillow regardless.

“Enter The Void” stars Nathaniel Brown as the small time drug dealer who promises to protect his little sister, a nightclub stripper — Paz de la Huerta, the very naked female from “The Limits of Control.” There’s no official date when the picture will arrive yet, but they just brokered the deal.