The Addiction

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Dan C Dipping with the cliches of 90s 'grittiness', this diatribe on philosophy, wrapped in a bizarre narrative about vampires, comes off more like a student film experiment than peice of cinema that has anything worthwhile to say. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 04/22/25 Full Review Steve D It isn't as clever as it thinks it is but it is interesting and beautifully shot. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 09/15/23 Full Review Audience Member The Addiction, a black and white arthouse vampire flick, revolves around a philosophy student developing a thirst for blood after being bitten by a mystery woman while walking along the street. The film, for some bizarre reason, led critics to speculate that the story night be a metaphor for drug addiction. I don't say this because that's one of many interpretations, but because the metaphor is so blatant that there's absolutely no way a person can possibly miss it. The word addiction is literally in the movies title! Also, director Abe Ferrara has himself struggled with drug addiction in the past, so it makes sense why he'd want to make a film with this subject matter. Its not a film with which I was especially enamoured. The performances are good and there's a palpable sense of escalation in terms of our lead's vampiric tendencies, but so much of it is just philosophical prattling, like the filmmakers took pieces written by Sartre, Aristotle, Descartes, Marx and the likes and simply lifted quotes and placed them into the script. It felt like a film I seen a few years ago, I'm Thinking Of Ending Things, where the majority of the dialogue was just 2 people trying to see who could say the smartest thing. The images of holocaust victims feels unnecessary and even tasteless, and not a lot was done to make our lead a sympathetic character. The best element was, unsurprisingly, Christopher Walken, who could do nothing but read out of the phone book for an hour and a half and you'd never lose interest. But his appearance is just a glorified cameo, a chance to inject yet more exposition into a story where every character already explains way too much. It didn't feel too long, and I wasn't ever bored by it, but I feel the film did a disservice to itself by having its metaphors be so on the nose as to be redundant. An interesting concept, but a result that just didn't appeal to me. Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 02/26/23 Full Review Audience Member The first hour was a good antidote to umpteen other vampire movies in which they are portrayed as either mindless bloodsuckers or toothed renaissance intellectuals who cannot stand light because of its affiliation with good. B&W made a huge difference to the realism - you can imagine all you want without colour - and the acting was largely beyond compare. A scene of apparent direct conflict with god took the shine off it. Then the party scene reverted to much we bored of long ago though thankfully Dante made an entry soon after and, unusually for a vampire movie, it became more interesting. As a physicist it's reassuring to see philosophers who spout nonsense get sucked dry of the little sense they possess. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 02/19/23 Full Review Audience Member Inspired by a mind transfixed by philosophical gibberish and vampire fetish has produced this weird monochrome tedium. Walked as ever acts well, I would struggle to recommend the rest of the film. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 01/28/23 Full Review Audience Member It's a cool little indie flick that one again uses Vampirism as symbolism for addiction. It's the kind pretentious little film that you expect to show at a smokey jazz club with a bongo playing in the background while you drone on psuedo-intellectually about philosophy. That said, there are some cool ideas and visuals working in it, and it raises some interesting points of discussion. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/11/19 Full Review Read all reviews

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