The Addiction (1995) is a very interesting movie. It's a super stylish vampire story shot in black and white, and it's concerned with the uncontrollable, searing pain of grief and the hideous tendrils of addiction. The pain of it all is palpable, and made all the more direct through its protagonist's low-level suppression of that pain. Underneath all that, though, is its incredible beauty.
The film achieves this insane, perfect film-noir style. The shadows intrude, always, and its characters and rooms are bathed in such stark, sinister light. It's quite remarkable to watch a film and be so struck by its visual style. There is an unstoppable, great pleasure in looking at this movie, and it plays with that in interesting ways when it shows you disgusting, horrible things - not just the viscera of vampiric activities, but also footage of real atrocities and scattered, still victims. It is a confronting movie, and it uses its intense, gorgeous visual style to put forth that confrontation. We live in a world of real horror, says the movie - what does that mean for our dark myths, our imagined, evil creatures?
I'll let these stills speak for themselves, for now.
Three hospital beds out of five.
★★★☆☆
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