A film noir that leaves you shaken to the core

Rating: 10/10 (18 November 2014)

The film starts innocently enough to put the viewers at ease until things start to take a turn towards progressively horrific. It's as if the four main characters are caught up in personal nightmares of their own with intersecting scenes. And its at those intersections that drug usage manifests itself in its true disturbing real life aspect.
The treatment of the film is novel and just appropriate. There's a touch of humour, in retrospect a black humour in the devices that are used, especially the camera movements and staccato frames of presentation when the young people are chasing the white powder.
While the protagonist's mother becomes addicted to "weight losing" pills, the protagonist and his girlfriend become progressively desperate to score more drugs for which they need money. It's as if they have been drawn into an endless nightmare from which there is no escape without losing all sense of dignity and the ownership of one's own body. Every character experiences this in their own way.And perhaps here is where the film delivers a message unambiguously to everyone out there: drug addicted people are either scorned by the general public or in worst cases used in a manner that is inhuman as it is criminal. It exposes the society's unforgiving ways and the hypocrisy of the affluent.
Of course the film was never made in order to convey a message but to honestly recreate the lives of addicted people and the tragedy they will inevitably have to go through. In a short period of time they will see their most cherished dreams, dreams that were pretty much within reach or do it seemed become unlikely fantasies or even caricatures of those dreams.
From a beautiful blooming romance, their drug usage leads them to the sleazy and dangerous paths where the young girl is taken advantage of in a more and more demeaning manner bu individuals who are experts at using women who need money. Meanwhile the protagonist and his friend moves from trouble to trouble from street violence to finally incarceration for drug usage.
The protagonist's mother had become a victim of an unscrupulous who prescribes psychotic drugs so that their patients who want to lose weight are easily able to diet. But as her condition progresses from bad to worse, her drug intake increases without any limits while she begins to hallucinate. Much later when she fails to respond to standard medications for her addiction, she is talked into a radically new approach which consists of passing electric shocks directly to the brain.i The end of the movie does nothing to resolve and reassure the audience but hints at more misery to come because there is no hint of even a speck of light at the end of a dark an deep tunnel. Overall, it's once of those movies which are very gripping yet you wish you did not want to see, especially because of the ending. In it's depiction of addicted people, the movie's stylisation does not make it yet another docudrama with emphasis of the gory dtails of drug intake and following euphoria and a steady progression to illness associated with heavy use. For sure all those things are there but the director treats them as repetitive motif from scene to scene while a very tragic drama plays itself out. one of the most accurate scenes in the movie is the protagonist's mother's hallucination or hallucinatory dreams.