‘Addiction‘ is not necessarily the story of an addiction, but rather the story of an act of devotion. Maybe that’s exactly what makes Lewis William Robinson’s short film a special project, since it avoids the recent conventional structures tackling a narrative of extremely miserable realism that portrays solely the total corruption of the individual. Obviously, in this short film, we are dealing with existential crises, with someone who throws himself into self-destructive gestures, and thus the project does not stop only at the isolated experience of the protagonist fighting his own demons. In fact, the director encompasses this suffering in a larger gear that simultaneously captures the stories of three men (a father and two sons) who realize that the pain is the result of the choices they are all responsible for. Drug addiction becomes just one element of this broad picture of a family facing the catastrophic consequences of a difficult past. Implicitly, the main character’s addiction seems to become the somatization of a shared suffering, of a trauma that waited far too long to be exorcised and that attacks not only the mental comfort of one individual, but the fragile balance of all the characters.
