Heaven Knows What

I'm beginning to really like the Safdies, whose magical realist elements -- the firework cell phone, the waxwork melting, the blood-sucking monster in Daddy Longlegs -- are so surprising but so organically integrated into what is otherwise a somewhat miserablist, verité aestethic. Like a fourth wall crumbling down, these moments shock the viewer out of the film and, I think, say something interesting about how a verité aesthetic can still not be experientially real or truthful.

It's nice to see what my high school classmates are up to these days.

the safdies are in love with this sub-culture; to dismiss HKW as a miserablist cautionary tale seems as facile as, say, labeling burzum (who makes a youtube appearance) as misanthropic. just as much exhilaration here as there is horror, as much LIFE as there is destruction. aside from all the nasty shit, it's a genuinely romantic--even sexy--doomed love story set in a community that's collectively riding full throttle along the edge of the abyss. that firework summarised everything perfectly.

Rather than feeling like a voyeur to addiction, this film placed me amidst the daily grind and emotions of a life I hope to never know. The music that bookends the film powerfully enforces much of the confusion and suffering that lies in between.

This is a difficult, intense, and very powerful vérité work about a heroin addict living in New York City. The film features some crazy beautiful electronic music, brutally intimate cinematography, and a third act so overwhelmingly, disturbingly romantic that you can't help but be drawn into the madness. It has nothing to do with morality or exposing a crisis of public health; it's just life as is, with a little surrealism dropped in at the right moments. I can't wait to see it again.

Should be absolutely praised for its completely unfiltered vérité approach. In its entire runtime there are only the slightest slivers of air to breathe, completely suffocating you in the filth and tangle of the NYC underworld. Exhausting but wholly engrossing.

Watched this with a recovering heroin addict. Her thoughts: "Yeah, that's pretty much exactly what it's like."

In their blisteringly uncompromising depiction of addiction and poverty, the Safdie Bros. usage of vérité aesthetics creates images so palpable in their filth that I wanted to take a shower and never ride a Greyhound bus again. Suffocatingly personal extreme close-ups coalesce with textured analog synths to paint a world that is at once chaotic, horrifying, and miserable, its verisimilitude so brash that you'd think actual addicts were taken from the streets for filming. Quite a doozy.

A powerful look at the life of the addicted and the homeless. Unflinching, difficult to watch, and incredibly engrossing. Arielle Holmes is incredible in the lead role.

Street life highs and lows become romanticized with a dirty glamour from Arielle. Love it's flow of natural tendencies between characters, bringing an extreme close-up to the screen.

If you love me, you would have watched this by now...

RIP Ilya

filthy. second nastiest use of tomita I've seen.

The Panic in Needle Park for people with ADD. All relentless forward momentum, set to unnerving, swirling synths. Probably the worst movie I could have watched just days before moving to New York. Joshua and Ben Safdie do a painfully accurate job of illustrating the city as a cesspool, a public mental institution. Having said that, if the point was to show the humanity in the junkies screaming on the street, they absolutely succeed.

Interesting junkie tale totally set in the streets of NYC -- and the best thing about it is that we barely see the city, just people running or walking by around these drug-driven characters. It's really a film about wandering like a vampire, just looking for the next thing that will make you feel high, but this look feels so energic and chaotic, that it feels impossible to be driven into it. These bums love each other at the same time they want to kill themselves. Beauty.

The Safdie brothers met Arielle Holmes on a subway platform, one thing led to another, and she stars as herself in a movie describing her life as a junkie, among junkies in Manhattan, especially her abusive valentine Ilya (Caleb Landry Jones). Her self-destructive obsession with him is comparable to her drug addiction. Highly naturalistic and gritty, it's the best portrayal of NYC dope fiends since Schatzberg's Panic in Needle Park (1971), and features an Isao Tomita soundtrack.

You can tell Arielle Holmes lived this, her performance is as real as it gets (I'm pretty sure she's actually high in most scenes, supported by the fact that the Safdie's supposedly brought her to rehab after shooting wrapped). The Safdie's do great work with non-actors in scenes that feel mostly improvised. It has that hybrid narrative/documentary blend found in Chloe Zhao's work

chaoticaly beautiful or beautifully chaotic? each character is so completely watchable yet lamentable in their complete selfishness - it pulls you along for the ride and doesn't let you off, the finale spinning you around until you feel like you don't know where the center is anyone. Arielle returning to the same familiar haunt without so much as a glance from her ex beaux feels poetic, her addiction to the same damaged people and places is as much a disease as the other

Sublime.

Having already seen Safdie brothers' newer work, I felt this was just more unpolished but still had that usual style. Very raw, realistic characters and storyline and just tense the whole way through. I love how they get "normal" people to play the roles. Buddy Duress is so good.

Requiem for a dream tadında, uyuşturucunun punk yaşamın ve toplum gözünden kaybedenlerin hayatını konu almış bir film. Yönetmen , rahatsız edici(etkili) müzikler, çekim teknikleri ve hikaye anlatıcılığıyla izleyiciyi yanından geçtiğiniz hayatların içine davet ediyor. Boşvermişliğin ve bağımlılığın (hem madde hem sosyal) katosferik harmonisini izliyoruz, Farklı ve sürükleyici, Öneririm. Puanım 7.9

Yes, homelessness and drug abuse can be super-tough in someone's life. However, even though the story is realistic and the film-making top-notch, nothing here that either matches my taste or interest.

woozy. more sobering than requiem for a dream, less sobering than christiane f

Fictionalized to the point of an appealing extrapolation of fringe culture but so that the intended sensation of the experience at the forefront loses a little sting and is many times forgotten. Extremely happy for Arielle Holmes regardless, didn't need the nude scene however. Soundtrack aids a ton in culling warped surreal anxiety from peak moments. Who knew Necro could kinda sorta act?

this movie starts to work for me about halfway through, but it IS admittedly about hanging with heroin addicts, and that is rough

Korine-esque sympathy for the forgotten. Will be interesting to see where they go with more sophisticated cinematography budgets.

I'm surprised Arielle Holmes was so instrumental in this film, because it's certainly not a flattering portrayal of a self-destructive personality. She openly rejects any and all signs of help in favour of remaining with her addiction and her manipulating bully boyfriend -- it makes for a frustrating watch, especially the purposefully episodic structure, which sacrifices a conclusiveness amongst this powerfully assured, free-flowing, and authentically told filmmaking.

My rating jumps a bit higher with each viewing. In terms of honest, raw films about both drug abuse AND mental illness, it's unprecedented. Rarely do filmmakers even try to tackle both themes, much less this well. It's not always easy to watch. If you've experienced this culture yourself or know someone who has, it can either be very comforting or very upsetting. It flows quickly and the filming is never dull or unimaginative. If you're looking for a nice plot, move on. This is a character film.

with Arielle Holmes starring as herself in this movie based on her own memoirs, realism and naturalism is what this movie has most going for it. While I get that the slice of life, not-going-anywhere plotting is the point of a movie about homeless addicts without any future, the pot did fail to really grab me at times. Although I did really love the ending.

Drugs suck. Rinse. Repeat. But that early hospital shot with the credits rolling was a stand out.

The best moments are the trashiest ones.

This movie is very crude and feels almost like a documentary, you really get into the mindset of a young lost addict which only life is on the street and whose time frame is only the present. Very nicely shot, great acting and good score sets this movie ahead from the pack

Totally not my kind of movie, but some interesting camerawork and use of music.

There was definitely a time (roughly ten years ago) when both this film's "gritty" verite aesthetics and homeless-junkies-in-love narrative would have been much more appealing to me than they are now. That said, the film's sheer relentless abrasiveness, from the performances to the camerawork to the soundtrack, shows a new found level of commitment from the Safdies, which feels like a step in the right direction (i think Bronstein's sensibility might be rubbing off on them in a good way).

This movie ends much as it begins, there is not much of a plot or conclusion. They simply follow a young junkie around as she wastes a few more weeks of her life, & shows her life threatening obsession with her abusive junkie lover. I felt a certain lack of authenticity, likely due to the white wash effect caused by the filming process. But still effective at showing the disgusting sad waste of another young life made useless by drugs. We all need to stop giving money to homeless junkies.

The aimlessness of their lives could've gone thematically farther in a Long Day's Journey Into Night sort of way. As is, you're left with a collection mixed quality but always realistic stories with on-the-money acting of NYC junkies. I've definitely seen that Central Park fight happen for real just north of Flatiron.

I liked the free floating nature of the script. Absent of a narrative, most of this movie is an hour-by-hour grind. Arielle's existence is tedious and uncomfortable and dirty. Her associates are strung out and predatory, and her "lover" is a fucking monster. It's not an enviable life. It's an empty life. Lots of wandering and loneliness. Note: There's an odd moment that transports you out of reality for a second that I enjoyed a lot.

It has a verite-style verisimilitude that keeps it engaging but this portrait of a subculture that most would prefer to ignore doesn't quite succeed in finding the reason for such discomfiting documentary-like hyper-realism.

14 Subat 2015, ifistanbul & Kirlenmis hissettim.

In true punk mode this is appropriately loud and devastating without ever connecting beyond a redundant cautionary tale. Arielle Holmes is a star though, keeping the musicality of the madness afloat.