00:00My BFI Player choice this week is a monochrome, modern vampire picture from the driller-killer
00:04himself Abel Ferrara.
00:06Hailed as a horror masterpiece by Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, it's a moody and strangely
00:11satirical affair that packs a whole lot of oddness into its slim 82-minute running time.
00:16The Addiction.
00:18Oh, fuck.
00:28Hey, lady.
00:30You alright?
00:32You okay?
00:34Come on, let me get you up.
00:35Sweetie.
00:36You alright?
00:37Huh?
00:38Come on.
00:39Let me get you up.
00:40Come on.
00:41Come on.
00:42Let me get you up.
00:43Come on.
00:44Get over here.
00:51Written by Ferrara's frequent collaborator Nicholas St John, who was thought for some
00:55years to be a pseudonym for the director, The Addiction stars Lily Taylor as Kathleen
01:01Conklin, an NYU philosophy student who develops a taste for blood after being attacked by
01:06a mysterious woman.
01:07A descent into literary and existential turmoil promptly ensues, swinging from scenes of crazed
01:12debauchery to literary invocations of William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, all leading to the
01:17poetic conclusion that self-revelation is annihilation of self.
01:22As with all of Ferrara's work, it's the interplay between dark and light that lies at the heart
01:27of The Addiction, that playfully angsty tension between the highbrow and the lowbrow, the
01:32divine and the depraved.
01:35Having made his mark with a scabrously intense serial killer flick which became a centrepiece
01:39of Britain's Video Nasties panic in the 80s, Ferrara earned acclaim and notoriety in equal
01:44measure with movies like Ms. 45, Bad Lieutenant and Dangerous Game, films with increasingly
01:50star-studded casts that rode that knife edge between arthouse and exploitation.
01:55No surprise that in 2014 he made a film about cinematic agent provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini,
02:01who met a violent death shortly after completing one of the most controversial movies of all
02:05time, Solo.
02:06In the canon of Ferrara's films, The Addiction sits alongside The Funeral, with which it
02:10makes an interesting companion piece, two films about mortality, both wrestling with
02:15profoundly metaphysical issues, but cloaked in the guise of genre cinema.
02:20A relentlessly unruly talent, Ferrara remains one of cinema's most prolifically unpredictable
02:25filmmakers, but it's movies like The Addiction that keep audiences and critics hungry for
02:30more.
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