‘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.
The narrative stakes of the project are extremely complex and certainly require a more detailed approach to the psychological nuances that are impossible to be accurately compressed in the parameters of a short film. However, Lewis William Robinson does an excellent job in compensating for these narrative ellipses through a visual vertigo of painful intimate poetry, pushing the structural coherence of his project towards the demands of a frantic delirium in whose cinematic material emotions, thoughts and pains of the three characters intertwine. Basically, even if the psychological premises of the characters are well determined, it is almost impossible to discern or prioritize the pain of these three souls in a desperate search for redemption. The short film excels, thus, through an intelligent editing and a good manipulation of the spatial and temporal perspectives that melt in a homogeneous image the past with the present, the reality with the illusion, the suffering and the devotion. ‘Addiction’ is a wonderful short film that has the vibration of an ample cinematic poem about suffering that, at the same time, divides and unites, destroys and offers new possibilities to teach us to love and appreciate the beauty of life.
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