Critical response
Thomas Sotinel of Le Monde started his review by recalling the irritation the film caused upon its world premiere in Cannes, and compared the cut he had seen there to the final version: "In all honesty, the difference does not jump to my eyes. Of course, the film seems more consistent, but that may be because we've already traveled this maze once. While leaving, we might remain calmer, but still amazed by the mixture of exuberant invention and puerility." A positive review came from L'Express, written by Laurent Djian, who compared the film to 2001: A Space Odyssey. He applauded how he found the strobe lights hypnotising in a way that influenced the perception of time. "In 2010, no other filmmaker [in France] than Gaspar Noé can shoot with such mastery, nor draw us into a vortex of sensations as vertiginous." Ouest-France's critic, on the other hand, was immensely bored by the film, and called it "a padding of simple ideas, stereotypes and cliches in a heap of contrived and vain images which think they're technical prowess. Soporific cinema."
Upon the Japanese release, the critic writing for The Japan Times reflected: "If Lost in Translation is the film you'd make when all you know about Japan are the pampered press junkets at Shinjuku 5-star hotels, then Enter the Void is what you would make if you never got beyond the Roppongi pub-crawl." While the review was largely negative, the author was still impressed by the visual depiction of the Japanese capital: "Visually, much of the film is stunning ... and the art design by Marc Caro (Delicatessen) takes Tokyo's love of neon gaudiness to a surreal extreme".
Enter the Void holds an approval rating of 73% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 97 English-language reviews, with an average rating of 6.80/10. The website's critics' consensus reads: "Grimy and psychedelic, Enter the Void ushers audiences through an out-of-body experience with the eye for extremity and technical wizardry that Gaspar Noé fans have come to expect." On Metacritic, the film holds a score of 69 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".
Peter Bradshaw included the film in The Guardian's top 50 films of the decade so far, and gave it five stars out of five. He compared it to Irréversible, which he had disliked:
Enter the Void is, in its way, just as provocative, just as extreme, just as mad, just as much of an outrageous ordeal[.] ... But despite its querulous melodrama and crazed Freudian pedantries, it has a human purpose the previous film lacked, and its sheer deranged brilliance is magnificent. ... Love him or loathe him – and I've done both in my time – Gaspar Noé is one of the very few directors who is actually trying to do something new with the medium, battling at the boundaries of the possible.
Andrew Male rated the film two out of five in Empire. Male called it "technically stunning", but also "dreadfully acted, tediously 'profound' and painfully overlong", and accused the director of misogyny. The Village Voice's Karina Longworth had several reservations about the film. She thought that the characters lacked emotional depth and called the story "a lame fusion of stoner lifestyle, sexual fetish, and philosophical inquiry", but still ended the review: "I could stare at this movie for days and not get tired of the sensation. A mash-up of the sacred, the profane, and the brain-dead, Enter the Void is addictive." Jen Chaney of The Washington Post thought that the film was successful as an "attempt to transport moviegoers to a hallucinatory version of the hereafter unlike anything they've ever witnessed on film", but added: "The problem is that it's also the most excruciating sit in recent cinematic memory. And no, the fact that it's intentionally excruciating doesn't make it less excruciating."
In a 2016 international critics' poll conducted by BBC, three critics listed Enter the Void as one of the greatest motion pictures since 2000.
