brace yourself ... not for the faint of heart

Rating: Null/10 (18 September 2002)

I saw this movie late at night on one of the movie channels that my cable company provides. I was intrigued by the cast, especially since I had just seen Jennifer Connelly's Academy Award winning performance in A Beautiful Mind a few weeks previous. I found the characters to be flawed but sympathetic, and the downward spiral that each of them takes into the world of drug addiction is seamlessly and believably portrayed. In fact, I found myself wishing at the end of the movie that I had not come to feel anything for any of them, because the climax of the film is so powerfully disturbing, I actually felt sick. I could not seem to look away from the horror of each of them unflinchingly viewed at the lowest point to which they individually may have sunk, in a directorial and editing extreme that goes beyond any other film I have seen in my life.
Brace yourself and view it alone, for the grave despair this film will leave you with will cause you to be unfit company for hours, if not days. In many ways, a brave achievement on the parts of all concerned (writer, director, actors), and in other ways: a horror that takes the literal definition of "obscene" to a new level.