It doesn’t particularly matter what your income level is when it comes to drug addiction. In fact, historically, there was a time in which using cocaine was not only viewed as safe and medicinal, it was a staple of high society. Now, however, while the perspective on cocaine has shifted, the only users who are looked down upon are the ones who can’t afford the purest version, creating a class system in which some users are perceived as lesser than others when, in actuality, they’re all seeing their time eaten by the same parasitic pastime. Using his own experience with addiction as inspiration, first-time feature filmmaker Aaron Strand developed Withdrawal, a romantic drama centering two individuals locked in a destructive cycle neither can break free of. Shot on digital video using local Georgia actors and continuing to tour on the festival circuit after premiering during Atlanta Film Festival 2025, Withdrawal is a horror show, inviting the audience to see an honest and raw depiction of two people in crisis desperate to change their futures but unable to recognize just how stuck they are.
L-R: Brent Michal as Jay and Millie Rose Evans as Viv in WITHDRAWAL. Photo courtesy of Atlanta Film Festival.
Musician Viv and artist Jay (Millie Rose Evans and Brent Michal, respectively) live and love together, bolstering each other’s passions, doing their best to achieve their dreams. However, they’ve also developed a heroin addiction that’s eaten away at their existence to the point where they barely notice that their once clean apartment is now a sty, bills are well overdue, and their friends have moved on without them. But when a scheduled meeting with her parents reveals that they want Viv to go to rehab or be cut off from all financial support, the two have 24 hours to make a decision: drugs or their dreams.
Withdrawal is a lot of things. It’s got this punk energy like Tom Tykwer’s kinetic Run Lola Run (1998), Emily Marquet’s (Perpetual Care) cinematography infusing the entire tale with a documentary feel that’s not quite cinema vérité due to its clear staging and blocking in sequences currently occurring and in flashback, but moving about the characters freely, capturing them in a grainy haze, as if we’re watching them from a VHS recording. Intentional or not, such a visual style conveys a sense of age and wear, not just on the film as a whole, but on the characters where they are in their lives. The film itself opens on the couple in an apartment, seemingly full of life and excitement, sharing a lovely moment of creative birth, then cutting to two years later and they are each visibly different, not in the way that time can wear on people (more grays, more weight, more wrinkles), but a weariness and a hunger despite potentially achieving a goal. The visual style and the ways in which it switches depending on place in time reinforces just how destructive and narrow Viv and Jay’s perspectives have become, even as they lie to themselves about the dreams they plan to pursue. I refer to it as a lie because a goal without a plan put in motion is little more than talk and upon learning about Jay’s perpetual inaction speaks to a lie, even if it’s one he tells himself to create a reason to keep moving forward.
L-R: Brent Michal as Jay and Millie Rose Evans as Viv in WITHDRAWAL. Photo courtesy of Atlanta Film Festival.
Given his own experience, it’s quite impactful how Strand’s script never once talks down to the characters and makes them neither heroes in their view nor total villains. This creates an opportunity for the audience to see them as people caught in a terrible cycle instead of as dissociative ne’er-do-wells unable to recognize the situation they are in. At first, of course, it would seem this way, especially given the knowledge that Viv’s parents are supporting them financially, between the choices to go to rehab or be cut off, Strand creates a third option — they try to get clean themselves in order to stay together. It’s this choice that enables Withdrawal to remain small and personal amid the different characters and their impact on the story. Rather than tell a story we’ve seen over and over again of two addicts at a diverging path, Strand utilizes the two’s shared desire to remain together to create the opportunity to lock them together in a room for 12 hours in which they must stay clean in order to get a prescribed med that may help them kick the habit. Autonomy is massive for any individual and Strand’s narrative raises the question as to whether or not autonomy is all it’s cracked up to be; that maybe someone else knows better and it’s ok to ask for and/or receive help. But how does one *know* that they can ask for help in the delusional state created by drug use? How can one break through the myriads of sensations the body believes it’s feeling, seeing, hearing, and touching when all the senses are misfiring and the brain is boiling from withdrawal? Impressively, among all of this, the script manages to include moments of levity and heart, even in the absolute worst situations, because life is exactly this complex, capable of interweaving tragicomedy at the whims of the moment.
Though a bit of an ensemble piece with side characters such as Allen Rowell’s Dr. Gilbert providing a moment of gentleness exactly when it’s needed to two lovers attempting recovery or Julian Green’s (Manhunt) Caleb, a former law school classmate to Viv, offering friendship and support that provides a test for the couple in a number of ways, the focus and weight is entirely on Evans (The In Between) and Michal (Girls Love Discarded Cigarettes). The narrative asks them to remain in the moment as they depict various ways in which couples are intimate with each other that aren’t depicted in rom-coms or love stories. It’s not just the way the actors bare themselves before us, but the utilization of their full forms to display the depths of discomfort withdrawal causes, often without regard for timing or intention. In one such moment, Jay scratching an itch on his back with a knife makes us squirm due to the absent-minded physical performance Michal provides; conversely, Viv switching between unbridled rage and frustration to digestive distress requires Evans to balance the needs of the moment without making it seem disingenuous. Put another way, Evans’s ability to twist Viv’s boiling frustrations into horror at needing help from the same person she was just threatening keeps the audience both on the edge of their seat and filled with compassion for the characters as the dire straights they are in come into razor-sharp focus, even amid the heavy grain within the frame.
L-R: Millie Rose Evans as Viv and Brent Michal as Jay in WITHDRAWAL. Photo courtesy of Atlanta Film Festival.
The ways in which someone becomes a drug addict are many. It can be as innocuous as sharing something with a friend or as malicious as being dosed, but however one starts down the path, it can be treacherous to go back to sober living. It requires not just access to tools to do so, but time, opportunity and a desire to do so. Unfortunately, this also creates a delineation between financial classes in how individuals who get sober are viewed. What Strand does not do is operate within such a separation, suggesting that it’s not easy for anyone to get clean and that doing so is not a sign of weakness, of giving up, but embracing strength and self-love. Even as the film inspires disgust one moment and awe in another, it never once implies that Viv and Jay are beyond redemption; it’s just up to them to decide whether they are worthy of their dreams.
World premiere during Atlanta Film Festival 2025.
Currently on the festival circuit.
For more information, head to the official Twisted Apple Films Withdrawal webpage.
Final Score: 4 out of 5.
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Categories: In Theaters, Reviews
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