Kathleen (Lili Taylor), a philosophy graduate student, is attacked and bitten by an unknown woman (Annabella Sciorra). She soon develops an addiction to blood, and to the evil that goes with taking it. An older vampire (Christopher Walken) cruelly attempts to teach her how to exist in her new state, holding her hostage and feeding from her. She escapes, with new motivation and insight into evil that allows her to finish her thesis.
I had a double major in mathematics and philosophy as an undergrad, switching from physics because I loved philosophy. I then entered grad school to study philosophy. I read Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre, to name a few. And I found The Addiction’s constant philosophizing pompous and overbearing. God help you if you don’t think reading Nietzsche is a good time (OK, no one really thinks reading Nietzsche is a good time, but some of us put up with it). The Addiction is like a freshman who just took his first one hundred level philosophy class and now wants to impress the senior girls with his newfound depth; he drops a few names, but doesn’t really understand the views and gets most of them wrong.
I can’t fault the b&w cinematography, nor Taylor’s performance. And Walken plays the normal Walken weirdo and that’s always fun. It is the script that fails the project.
Vampirism is used as a metaphor for drug addiction, which in turn is used as a metaphor for evil, and humanity’s “addiction” to it. This is a message movie that missed the ideas of subtext and subtlety. Plot and character are shoved aside to make room for more message. With that emphasis on theme, and all those dead philosophers dug up, I expected something pretty complicated and thought-provoking. And that’s the final failing. For more than an hour, the nature of evil is chewed on and tossed around. So, when all of that is forgotten at the end, I start wondering why I watched any of it. The final, in-your-face message is: man is filled with sin, and only by giving yourself to God can you be free of it. That’s it. OK, that’s fine if that’s what you want to say, but then build to that. Instead, it was just stated, with no connection to the rest of the movie. I could get that on the first page of a thousand Christian newsletters and save myself eighty-two minutes.