This shot is mesmerizing.

The lens is tinted, the film grainy, the recurring black symbolises a gothic cloud of sorts. Irregardless of her makeup, the tension etches through the lens. Her mascara is running and the single tear down her right cheek says more than a words on a sheet of paper could. The reasonable assumption made is that a caller has given her bad news and the event she got dolled up for didn’t go as planned.

This split second reveals so much about Marion, Jennifer Connely’s character. Her arc like the rest of the titular characters signifies an abject descent into the hopeless claws of addiction. More so than addiction, it’s a film about abandonment of hope. This theme and its insufferable execution are what grant the 2000 Oscar-winning film, Requiem of a Dream its wings to fly into our deepest sense of horror and stay.

When the credits started rolling on my first watch, it took me a while to ingest what my eyes had just been exposed to. From the peaks of a nostalgic Brooklyn summer to a demoralizing end, the film is stunningly painful.

Harry (Jared Leto) and Marion’s (Jennifer Connelly) drug-fueled puppy love feels foreboding even in the heat of their romance. Yet, the story manages to keep even the worst romantics at bay before the post-modern reality’s stresses settle in.

No character suffers the brute end of addiction like Sara (Ellen Burstyn). A lonely widow, her old age is intercepted by doctor visits and badgering from Harry, her son. As her years wince, she yearns for her moment in the spotlight. A moment where she’ll don the red dress and come alive. She longs for the fulfillment a B-level reality show will provide. An unhealthy obsession ultimately becomes her downfall. Visualised through montages of the show’s audience applause and her red dress in the spotlight, this obsession becomes mentally straining. She suffers a body image dilemma and doesn’t eat for days. Her physician’s adderall supplements further signify how indulgent the health system is to the very issues it’s attempting to remedy.

Out of all character’s addictions, Sara’s is the most saddening because of her innocence. The younger characters retain some semblance of hope or the American Dream. As I watched their arcs progress, I believed there must be some chance at redemption — hope. Despite all the promise and gung-ho visions of happiness, however, they’re infallibly pulled back into a cold unforgiving world of drugs and woes.

The discouraging light Requiem shines on addiction is not new. In fact, it’s a truism. However, as a viewer my exposure to this lifestyle of highs and lows starts at the title and ends when the credits roll. Having met a heroine-addicted homeless man by chance and considered the movie’s impact, I had an epiphany. Despite the initial fear of conversing with a stranger, I grew empathy for the man’s addiction to heroin. To him, drugs were a coping method to get through the cold winter nights of concrete and plastic bags. Who’s to say, he too didn’t fall victim to the initial bursts of pleasure that drugs bring, but, the sincerity in his eyes and of his situation led me to believe different.

Like the character’s into their glamorous lifestyle, we give hope into the lives of these fictional creatures only to have it taken from us. And we cry. Isn’t that odd? That the gap between reality and story is some how blurred and we feel? Such is the beauty of film and all its counterparts. The easy money a criminal life promises, the alluring fame from going on a B minus-quality TV show and the neverending happiness of a relationship – rabbit holes of hope that we can all fall prey to.

It is not for the faint of heart, but Requiem for a Dream is a stunningly demoralizing movie about the abandonment of hope and possibly the “best film you’ll never want to watch again”