One word: overrated

Rating: 2/10 (28 February 2016)

I finally got round to watching this after years of hearing all the hype and telling myself that one day I would have to see what all the fuss was about.
I have often heard people talk about this film being an amazing (albeit disturbing) portrayal of addiction - but I couldn't disagree more.
Part of the problem here is the extremes that these characters experience - extremes that are so detached from reality that they end up alienating the audience from the true reality of what addiction actually means for people who live it. It's almost like watching a cartoonish and deliberately over-hyped exaggeration of clichés about addiction.
The problem is that they are so far removed from the reality of your average person, and from the truth about how serious addictions effect most people that it comes across as totally disconnected from the real world.
Another thing that really struck me was the decision to weave in the storyline about the mother's addiction to diet pills and TV, which is compared with a major drug addiction - but in doing so this trivializes the seriousness of drug addiction, while also doing no favors for people who struggle with food-related addictions and other compulsions.
It's almost as if, during the writing process, the primary question that drove the script was: 'what's the most shocking thing that we could imagine happening to these characters - let's do that, and then just use addiction as the Ex Machina plot device to justify including those shocking scenes.
By the end credits, it literally felt to me like the sort of concepts that a teenager would come up with if they were asked to make a film about addiction - it just felt a bit like a series of clichéd stereotypes that were there to hit you over the head, rather than a serious attempt to delve into the reality of addiction and tell a story about those whose lives are afflicted by it.
The true reality is that the very reason addiction can be so much more damaging to people is precisely because it can go unnoticed, or even incorporated into their daily lives for so many years, with such a level of mundane functionality that over time it robs a person of true flourishing and all the various potential they started out with in life. A lifetime of accumulated bad decisions and outcomes caused by addiction is far more serious and damaging to a person than one off shocking events tend to be.