technically brilliant, otherwise mediocre

Rating: 7/10 (27 September 2001)

**Warning: spoilers ahead**
At basis, this is a pretty simple sort of drug film. It depicts the lives of four people, and how drugs are instrumental in their downfall. One loses sanity; another loses innocence and self-respect; another loses freedom; another loses an arm. The message is hardly subtle: drugs can mess you up. Well, duh.
Three of these characters fall into destructive drug use in the ordinary, expected way: through escalating recreational use. More interesting is Ellen Burstyn's character, who instead naively allows herself to become dependent on amphetamines in order to lose weight for a television appearance -- an appearance we, as the audience, of course know will probably never happen, but which gives her otherwise meaningless life new hope.

It's a shame, really, that her character wasn't given primary focus in this film. For her, drugs are simply the incidental means to fulfilling some deeper desire rather than an end in themselves. She doesn't self-destruct because she wants to get high, but simply because she wants some reason to feel alive again. Much more could have been done with this idea if the movie hadn't been too busy showing the other characters' more routine kinds of addiction.
This movie really doesn't stand out as a particularly poignant or interesting drug film, then -- certainly nothing to rival, say, Traffic. Where it does stand out is in technical excellence. The filmmaking is so perfect it is nearly sublime; if the movie fails in having a new or interesting message, it certainly succeeds in imparting its message with stylistic force. If for no other reason, Requiem deserves to be seen by anyone who loves a well-made film.