lord_ruthven Review of The Addiction

The Addiction (1995)

Flawless... one of the best horror movies of all times!

[10/10 · 9 December 2006]

The Addiction is an absolutely perfect movie, the opus #10 of the great Abel Ferrara. Starting with a narrative material that's decidedly pulp, but ennobled by numerous philosophical quotations that are an expert miscellanea of the negative thought of the Eighteenth and Twentieth centuries, the director and his writer Nicholas St. John have built an anguished and tormented interrogation about the presence of the Evil in the world, a movie that instills a real sensation of anxiety and painful participation. Here the myth of vampirism is distorted and re-elaborated in a modern way as a metaphor of the addiction, and in particular of the only addiction that's common to every human being: the addiction to evil. The main character comes to the conclusion that humanity is only attracted by sin and cruelty, but the end opens to a way of redemption that comes from the understanding and acceptance of her own condition. Everything is magnificently supported by an exceptional visual apparatus, by a black and white photography inspired by the atmosphere of the expressionism and of the American noirs of the Forties, and by an extremely convincing cast. In conclusion, this is a strange, deeply disturbing movie, that maybe can be judged as dirty, realistic and iper-realistic at the same time in its personal and expressionist poetic of horror, it's a movie about pain, loneliness, addiction, contagion, incommunicability and death, and it's surely one of the most mature examples of horror cinema.