‘Endtrip’ Is an Animated Psychedelic Death Fantasia

Screenshot of a scene from Endtrip

Enter the Void stands alone as perhaps the trippiest, sleaziest, most surreal death trip in cinema. The main character, flush in a DMT trip, has one heck of a vision. Is it a hallucination of death or the hallucinatory afterworld of death? The question is never answered—the viewer must instead decide. A similar effect is unfurled in Endtrip, an animated 3D psychedelic death experience.

Directed and created by Koen de Mol, Olivier Ballast, Rick Franssen, it is much more fantastical than Enter the Void. Something like Gilliam remixing Noe’s film with The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The latter filmmaker’s influence is immediately felt with the neon day-glo title sequence, as well as the grainy and gritty scene of the girl’s overdose. The submerged, amniotic noises, along with the flickering and intermittently out-of-focus visuals also call to mind Noe’s masterwork.

The short film is least effective in these moments of mimicry. But, de Mol, Ballast, and Franssen quickly right the ship as the girl, and the audience, retreat deep into the fibers of her eye and mind. Here, the pulsations of light, which channel through the eye’s muscles, are really quite beautiful. And this is where the fantasia begins, and the filmmakers go cosmic. That’s as far as I’ll go in the description, since it begs to be watched instead of explained. 

Other influences come to mind as well, such as Ram Dass’s thoughts on death, and William S. Burroughs’ underrated novel The Western Lands, which set up an elaborate, science fictional system of hallucinatory afterlife. But, these are personal associations. Endtrip is really its own thing when it isn’t taking too many cues from Noe. 

Endtrip from Endtrip on Vimeo.