Watched this one in the bath. If like me you found Mandy (2018) to be insufficiently and insincerely engaged with real darkness, then consider this harrowing piece of “young street people addicted to heroine in midtown” vérité, starring/written by Arielle Holmes for the Safdies, who met Holmes during early work on Uncut Gems in midtown, where she was spanging, and they correctly decided she “should be in movies.” A no-way-out nightmare movie that operates in the borderlands between “fiction” and “documentary,” matching “actors” with “non-actors playing themselves,” crossing the immediate, direct anti-logic/anti-meaning of addiction and on-the-street desperation with the insular privacy and psychodrama of abuse, loneliness, and doomed/dooming love. Typically great Safdie sound design, and with everything shot at high zoom levels from a distance, to ultra-claustrophobic, wobbling effect. Imo an incredible NYC movie, and roughly the evil opposite of Skate Kitchen (2018), which I’d recommend as a palate cleanser. For abyss-starers only.
