Director: Abel Ferrara
MPAA Rating: NR
Run Time: 82 Minutes
Purchase: Amazon
This product was provided by Arrow Video for the purpose of this review. All opinions are our own.
The nineties marked a boom for the vampire genre, with films like Interview with the Vampire, From Dusk Till Dawn and Dracula, among others, drawing both critical and commercial success. An outlier among those more mainstream vampire titles was Abel Ferrara’s experimental arthouse flick The Addiction.
Shot in beautiful monochromatic black and white, the film stars Lili Taylor as Kathleen, a graduate student of philosophy, finishing up her dissertation on the atrocities of Vietnam. One evening, after a late night of research, she gets pulled into a dark alleyway by a mysterious woman who proceeds to bite her neck, resulting in Kathleen craving human blood.
A fairly transparent metaphor for heroin addiction, Kathleen begins her pursuits by extracting blood from the homeless, mainlining it into her veins with syringes, before feasting on the blood of her friends and peers, effectively turning them into vampires as well.
One of Ferrara’s most visually arresting films, The Addiction uses black-and-white photography set against the gritty New York City backdrop to create a macabre narrative, punctuated with top-notch lighting, often casting symbolic shadows over the characters evoking the religious undertones of the film.
Often regarded as being too pretentious for its own good, the film blends religion, philosophy, horror, opioid addiction and war, with Ferrara periodically bombarding the audience with close-up images of war crimes perpetrated in Vietnam. It’s a combination that doesn’t always work, particularly the frequent philosophical discussions and war imagery, though the former can be excused considering the principal characters are all students of philosophy. Still, to call this film pretentious is a bit of a misnomer.
With an incredible performance from Taylor and a solid cameo by Christopher Walken, this is one of Ferrara’s best and is worth a look, especially because there’s a new director-approved Blu-ray available from Arrow Video. The Blu-ray contains a new restoration from 4k scans of the original camera negative, providing a clean, nearly flawless transfer.
There are two audio tracks available, including 5.1 DTS-HD and 2.0 LPCM (stereo), which I had to switch to, as the dialogue was incredibly low on the 5.1 setting to the point that I couldn’t hear half of Taylor’s lines. This may just be my surround-sound setup, but I thought it was worth mentioning.
Included on the disc are a slew of special features, not the least of which is a new documentary about the film directed by Ferrara himself. This curious little featurette is of comprised cast and crew interviews conducted by Ferrara and amounts to a series of seemingly random tangents that only have a tertiary link to the film, but it’s highly entertaining nonetheless.
Also included is a new interview with Abel Ferrara, an audio commentary track, a featurette with critic Brad Stevens discussing the film, archival footage of Ferrara editing the film, as well as the original trailer. Arrow has also included a reversible cover and a 31-page booklet with production notes, essays and stills from the film. Overall, this is an excellent Blu-ray that remains in line with the quality and care Arrow puts into nearly all of their releases.
