The Addiction (1995)

Christopher Walken appears in The Addiction for maybe ten minutes, tops. And yet he's the thing I keep coming back to. There's a scene where he turns up like some knowing, elegant predator and delivers a kind of quiet sermon on power, appetite, and choice, and he does it with this loose, almost playful authority that makes everyone around him look like they're acting in a different, lesser film. It's a reminder of what this movie could have been if it had trusted its instincts a little more and its philosophy lecture notes a little less.

Abel Ferrara's vampire picture is genuinely unlike anything else in the genre. Shot in crisp, unforgiving black-and-white on the streets of New York, it follows a philosophy PhD student whose encounter with a vampire sends her spiralling into compulsion, self-disgust, and moral collapse. The conceit is clear from the off: the vampirism isn't really about vampirism. It's about addiction, about the way we give ourselves over to destruction and then construct elaborate intellectual frameworks to justify it. Nietzsche gets name-dropped. So does Catholic guilt. So does the Holocaust. Ferrara is swinging for something genuinely ambitious here, and I respect that enormously.

If you've seen Ferrara's King of New York, you'll already know he's not a filmmaker who traffics in comfortable, crowd-pleasing cinema. He likes his films cold and morally unresolved, and The Addiction is no different. The New York he presents is grey, indifferent, and claustrophobic, a city that doesn't notice you suffering. That texture is right, and it works.

But here's my problem. The film's biggest flaw is also its most consistent one: the dialogue. Characters don't speak to each other so much as recite at each other. Lines are lifted almost wholesale from philosophy texts and dropped into conversations with all the naturalism of a university seminar. I understand the intention. The whole point is that the protagonist uses intellectual abstraction to distance herself from the horror of what she's become. Fine. Thematically coherent. But in practice, watching it, you're held at arm's length for the entire runtime. Her turmoil never quite gets under your skin because the film keeps insisting on telling you what to think about it rather than making you feel it.

There's something almost perversely committed about that choice, and I go back and forth on whether it's brave or just exhausting. Probably both, if I'm honest. Films that think this hard about their own ideas can be genuinely thrilling, and there are moments here where the intellectual weight lands properly, where guilt and compulsion feel like they're being examined in a way that horror rarely attempts. But feeling is what's missing. The film thinks deeply and then forgets to breathe.

Lili Taylor in the lead role is doing serious, committed work. She carries the film's physical and psychological deterioration convincingly, and she's on screen in nearly every scene. The performance deserved a script that trusted her with something warmer and more human to work with. Walken, by contrast, waltzes in with almost no setup and owns every second. The contrast is almost unfair.

Visually, it's striking throughout. The black-and-white photography gives the whole thing a suitable harshness, and Ferrara knows how to use a frame. There's genuine atmosphere here, a cold, alienated, nocturnal New York that feels genuinely threatening. If you enjoy horror that sits closer to Derek Jarman than Bram Stoker, that prioritises mood and idea over plot mechanics, you might find more to love in this than I did. I found myself thinking of Cemetery Man, another mid-nineties European-flavoured horror with ambitions beyond the genre, though that film managed to be considerably more fun with its existential despair.

Three stars. Worth your time if you're curious about where the vampire film can go when it strips away the genre furniture entirely. Worth it for Walken unconditionally. But go in knowing it's more admirable than it is enjoyable, more an intellectual exercise than an experience that gets its teeth into you. Which, given what it's about, might be the whole point. I'm still not sure that makes it forgivable.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 1995  | Watched: 2026-04-10

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Abel Ferrara: King of New York (1990) · Ms .45 (1981)
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More horror: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Viy (1967) · Nightmare City (1980) · Angst (1983)