"Enter the Void" is a dazzling trip

By the time the credits stop rolling at the top of Gaspar Noé's dazzling neo-expressionist freak-out Enter the Void, you'll have a migraine - if not a full-blown grand mal seizure.

An aggressive strobe-light assault, the sequence is there to soften us up for the psychedelic frenzy that will follow.

Migraines. Assault. Frenzy. Hardly a great endorsement.

Yet, Noé's also is an accomplished, daring, even great film.

Enter the Void inspires ambivalence. Aside from its technical brilliance, it is an experience equally sublime and infuriating, revelatory and painful, ecstatic and terrifying.

It's less a story than a series of moods and sensations.

The credits melt into a kaleidoscope of befuddling geometric shapes and spiraling colors.

We're watching the world from inside the head of our hero, Oscar (Nathaniel Brown).

Worse, his head, his senses, his thoughts are all twisted up on LSD.

Things get even more surreal when Oscar - a twentysomething American dreamer-turned-drug dealer who lives in Tokyo - is shot dead by the cops.

Oscar is now spirit. An ego without body floating above Tokyo.

His wanderings - photographed as a phantasmagoria of sounds, shapes, and hues - loosely follow the logic of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, which Oscar had been reading. His greatest task, according to the book, is to survey his life story.

It wasn't a happy life: Oscar was orphaned at a young age and separated from his sister, Linda. Recently reunited, they eke out a living in Tokyo - he as a drug dealer, she as a stripper. Paz de la Huerta (Boardwalk Empire) turns in a brave turn as Linda, whose sex life is busy, yet empty of real joy.

Don't expect a linear story. Noé lays out Oscar's memories - brief, gorgeous film postcards - in interlocking mosaic patterns.

The pieces never cohere into a seamless, unified whole. Life remains open-ended - even after death.

In another of the Buddhist ideas woven into the film, Oscar's travels into people's lives reveal how hopelessly we can be trapped by desire and regret.

Noé can never be accused of making soothing art. His notorious thriller Irreversible features one of the most brutal rape scenes in film.

In Enter the Void, he wrenches viewers out of their comfort zone and into a visceral trip as unforgettable for its ideas as for its provocative imagery.EndText