REVIEW

‘Withdrawal’: Aaron Strand’s Pulsating Heroin-Addiction Drama Is an Independent-Film Triumph

Millie Rose Evans and Brent Michal deliver fearless performances in a harrowing love story that recalls “The Panic in Needle Park” and the brutal realism of “Euphoria.”

“Withdrawal” is pulsating with energy. From the first frame to the last, director Aaron Strand locks us inside Viv and Jay’s feverish, unraveling world.

What a ride.

Viv, played with startling emotional honesty by Millie Rose Evans, is a passionate and delusional singer-songwriter struggling to create an artistic life from circumstances already worn threadbare. Jay, played by the remarkable Brent Michal, is her equally delusional and enabling boyfriend, creative partner and companion in their crippling heroin addiction.

He convinces Viv that he cannot live without her, although she is paying their bills with her parents’ credit cards. Like many women caught in the web of a manipulative partner, she believes they are holding each other together. In reality, each has become the weight dragging the other beneath the surface.

Written and directed by Strand, “Withdrawal” is a modern descendant of “The Panic in Needle Park,” stripped of romantic fantasy and filmed with the nervous immediacy of a life being documented moments before it collapses. Not since HBO’s groundbreaking series “Euphoria” have I seen such a painfully realistic portrayal of addiction and the destructive relationships that form around it.

This is not addiction observed from a comfortable distance. Strand puts the audience inside the room, inside the sickness and inside the distorted logic that keeps Viv and Jay bound together.

When Viv’s wealthy, conservative parents hire an interventionist to take her to rehabilitation, she and Jay reject professional treatment. Instead, they decide to endure withdrawal alone with little more than a Suboxone prescription and the dangerous conviction that their love will be enough.

All they have to do is get through 12 hours.

As one excruciating night unfolds, physical agony, psychological terror, and fractured memories begin dismantling every comforting fiction they have created about themselves. Their bodies revolt. Resentments surface. Tenderness mutates into manipulation, rage and panic.

Inspired by true events and shot on location in Athens, Georgia, “Withdrawal” is a romance viewed through the bruised, gritty lens of independent digital filmmaking. Strand understands that addiction infects everything it touches: ambition, memory, sex, money, creativity and love.

Evans is extraordinary.

Her performance never asks the audience to pity Viv, nor does it reduce her to the familiar image of a promising young woman destroyed by drugs. Viv is intelligent, talented, frightened, selfish and deeply wounded. Evans allows those contradictions to remain visible.

Even as Viv’s body begins to rebel against her, we can still see the stubborn artist, the desperate daughter and the terrified young woman trying to determine whether the man beside her is saving her or killing her.

Then there is Michal, who gives Jay one of the most complicated and infuriating characterizations I have seen in a long time.

I loathed him.

For Viv, Jay may be the worst thing ever to enter her life: a walking, talking, heroin-shooting, cancerous tumor of a character. He manipulates, deflects, and feeds their shared delusion. His declarations of love are inseparable from his dependency on her money, loyalty, and willingness to protect him from the consequences of his behavior.

Yet my loathing for Jay exists because Michal’s performance is so completely convincing.

He understands that Jay cannot simply be played as a conventional villain. His charm must explain the danger. His vulnerability must make the trap believable. There are moments when he appears almost tender, and those moments are more unsettling than his cruelty because they reveal why Viv has remained.

Michal and Evans create two doomed people surviving on heroin, artistic fantasy and mutual dependency. Their chemistry is undeniable, but never comforting. They mistake suffering together for proof that they belong together.

One of the film’s best lines is also its most brutally truthful:

“Junkies don’t have friends.”

The words strike at the center of the story. Addiction has hollowed out Viv and Jay’s relationships and reorganized their world. Every person becomes a possible source of money, shelter, forgiveness or drugs. Even love has become transactional, although the couple continues calling it romance.

Strand’s direction is bold, disciplined and emotionally precise. He is a director who understands how to bring out the best in everyone on screen. He gives his actors room to expose their characters without allowing the film to lose its momentum.

The supporting cast, including Jeanne Heaton and Julian Green, is equally grounded. No one appears merely to deliver information or represent a moral position. The people surrounding Viv and Jay have their own histories with them, along with their own exhaustion, anger and reasons for no longer believing their promises.

Strand also refuses to turn withdrawal into a sentimental countdown toward redemption. The night does not progress neatly toward recovery. It is chaotic, humiliating and terrifying. Hope can be followed immediately by manipulation. Affection can become cruelty. A shared memory can reveal itself as another lie.

Cinematographer Emily Marquet’s work is equally impressive. Shot using MiniDV, the Blackmagic URSA Cine and Super 16mm, “Withdrawal” possesses an appropriately unstable visual identity. The images can feel intimate, abrasive, beautiful and contaminated at the same time.

The MiniDV texture is particularly effective, evoking underground music videos, private recordings and memories preserved on technology never intended to make them permanent. Certain scenes have the uneasy quality of evidence.

Athens is not used as decorative Southern scenery. Its streets, rooms and creative spaces feel lived in, carrying traces of the lives Viv and Jay might have built had addiction not consumed them.

Made on a reported budget of $60,000, “Withdrawal” is a remarkable demonstration of what independent filmmaking can accomplish when financial limitations are met with imagination rather than apology. Strand’s command of tone, Marquet’s cinematography and the uncompromising performances from Evans and Michal make the production feel far larger than its resources.

The film has already earned festival recognition for narrative feature, directing, acting and cinematography. The accolades are understandable, but “Withdrawal” deserves a much wider audience.

This is a gem of a surprise: bold, intimate, beautifully acted and difficult to shake.

Strand has made an addiction drama that understands dependency as something larger than chemical hunger. Viv and Jay are addicted to heroin, but they are also addicted to the mythology they have created around themselves—the musicians they might become, the lovers they imagine they are, and the future they keep promising will begin tomorrow.

“Withdrawal” understands that sometimes the drug is only part of what must be surrendered.

“A modern-day The Panic in Needle Park—pulsating with energy and impossible to look away from.”

— Lapacazo M. Sandoval, Amsterdam News

Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

'Withdrawal' on Instagram: @withdrawalfilm