here<\/a>, along with Kindertrauma\u2019s reflections on the film. I watched it last night and suspect I need to watch it at least once more before I have any firm opinions.<\/p>\nThe movie opens with its leads, Lili Taylor and Edie Falco, in a college class watching slides from My Lai. The recurring photos of real-life atrocities aren\u2019t being used cynically to raise the stakes (\u2026see what I did there?) of a vampire movie; they\u2019re unsubtle indications that the movie is about the origin and nature of evil. The vampires are a way of getting at the question of why atrocities happen. The characters throw out a lot<\/em> of philosophical and theological one-liners: My favorite was, \u201cMedicine is just an extended metaphor for omnipotence.\u201d So you\u2019ve gotta have patience for that kind of thing, or you will just hate this movie. But I was surprised at how well the philosophies hung together despite sounding<\/em> like shallow, cynical undergraduate vaporings. This is a smarter and harder movie than it may seem.<\/p>\nIts basic question, I think, is whether everyone is inherently evil and our evil actions are simply the welling-up of an ineradicable cruelty within us, like blood seeping from a cut vein; or whether we\u2019re able to choose between good and evil on our own, so that evil is a property of actions rather than people. There are ways to turn that question so it is more intelligible within Christian orthodoxy or less, and the movie turns it both ways, so that sometimes I felt like I didn\u2019t even accept the terms of the question and other times I felt like Ferrara had crafted an extraordinarily powerful depiction of the nature of sin and the need for supernatural redemption.<\/p>\n
The acting is excellent, just enough too much. Taylor\u2019s junkie crawl is some of the scariest horror-movie movement outside of Ringu<\/em>, and the vampire attacks are shockingly physical. (There\u2019s a nice mirroring, as well, between the climactic blood frenzy and a moment in the denouement when passersby try to help one of the vampires.) The black-and-white works both because it creates a depressing, stifling atmosphere rather than the big, exuberant red blood splashes in most vampire films; and because it lets the historical photos blur into the fictional narrative. The music is frequently hilarious, a needed counterpoint to the heavy material onscreen.<\/p>\nThe Addiction<\/em> is short\u2013not even an hour and a half\u2013and thoroughly compelling. It\u2019s a movie that really believes in what it\u2019s doing: a movie with no ironic disclaimers, no distance.<\/p>\n