Drugs from the movie Requiem for a Dream

Drugs from the movie Requiem for a Dream - Man dreaming about going to space in cinema

The movie Requiem for a Dream gives a graphic elucidation on drugs. They show you what would be the consequences of taking drugs knowingly and unknowingly.

The lead actors, Jered Leto and Jennifer Connelly are heroin addicts, they face challenges to keep up with the availability and the expense of the drug, Connelly is forced to do sell her body to get money to buy the drug.

There is another African American character who is falsely arrested because he was involved in a shootout (gang violence). Later on, he and Leto go to Miami to buy heroin because they had heard about a better deal, where they get arrested again because Leto's arm was falling apart. (The message here likely is, there is a possibility of a person getting arrested, and will have a negative impact on your well being when you are in the vicinity of drugs or have a link to it).

I understood the heroin side of the movie, they know it is bad for them and they still continue to do it because I think the drug has taken control over their reward system.

Now, Leto's mom Sara gets addicted to another drug unknowingly, which makes her fall into this loophole of losing weight and it's almost like OCD because she is constantly trying to appear pretty for this television show.

Was the television show a hallucination or was it real? What drugs did Sara take that got her addicted to the TV show? What was the message the film-maker was trying to convey with respect to Sara?



Best Answer

It’s been a few years since I watched it, but my opinions:

  1. The television show was not real. It was a hallucination brought on her excessive drug use and affinity of television.
  2. The drugs were almost certainly an amphetamine of some sort. It was long used as a weight loss drug or part of a weight loss drug.
  3. My take away had been that the drugs pushed by doctors are as dangerous as the hard street drugs



Pictures about "Drugs from the movie Requiem for a Dream"

Drugs from the movie Requiem for a Dream - Sad isolated young woman looking away through fence with hope
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Is Requiem for a Dream an anti drug?

However, there has truly never been a movie about drug abuse like the now 20-year-old Requiem for a Dream (2000). It leaves the audience with a sick feeling by the end; it is certainly the most effective anti-drug PSA there ever was.

What happens to Jared Leto in Requiem for a Dream?

Unlike most films that have a pretense of "objectivity" posing as realism, Requiem's stylization is so amped up that it actually becomes a far more "realistic" film as a result. The technique captures the experience of addiction by finding its cinematic objective correlative.

Is Requiem for a Dream realistic?

For most films averaging a runtime of 100 minutes or so, roughly 500-600 shots are used. But thanks to what has been dubbed the "hip-hop montage" sequence, Requiem for a Dream includes an excess of 2,000 shots.



Requiem for a Dream (1/12) Movie CLIP - Boss Skag (2000) HD




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