American Relapse

Gripping...It’s a tough, distressing film, yet in the measured hands of directors Pat McGee and Adam Linkenhelt, its emotional and humanistic qualities transcend the kind of exploitive defaults that could have made this a punishing, eye-popping horror show.

Eye-opening and damning, American Relapse is a blunt force look at the “cycle” of opioid addiction and the ways this American epidemic has been monetized by those with an eye towards making a buck out of any bad thing that happens.

Whatever its shortcomings, American Relapse deepens our sense of the catastrophe caused by opioid overprescription and over-availability.

The aesthetic devices used by the directors to embellish their material — including educational and archival videos, split-screens, slow-motion, time-lapse footage, and lingering close-ups of needles and money — are a bit too self-consciously stylish for their own good. Nonetheless, their film captures the recurring nightmare of substance abuse.