Addiction can also send your emotional danger-sensing circuits into overdrive, making you feel anxious and stressed when you’re not using the drugs or alcohol.
“Biology of Addiction,” News in Health, October 2015
Despite scientific discoveries on addiction being a disease, many still view it as a choice or a signifier of an individual’s lack of willpower. But what if we could peer into an addict’s mind, to witness the pain of their regrets and the horrors endured daily fighting with an unyielding disease? Enter Puzzle Box, an Australian found footage offering written and directed by Jack Dignan which documents an addict’s descent into madness and ruin.
Kait (Kaitlyn Boyé), a recovering drug and alcohol addict, takes a cabin retreat with her doting sister Olivia (Laneikka Denne) in hopes of “self-rehibilitating.” Within 10 minutes, the setting morphs into a house of horrors filled with dread, suffocating darkness, and a stalking banshee played to chilling effect by Cassandre Girard.
The found footage motif serves to highlight the complicated relationship between the sisters. Olivia hopes to document Kait’s weekend journey while the latter quickly grows to resent the fishbowl intrusiveness. These tense moments reflects the burden addiction places on immediate family members who’re blamed for not understanding, and also on the user who carries the loneliness of withdrawal.
Within that isolation is where Puzzle Box’s horror is most effective. The cabin morphs into an endless laybrinth with doors leading to new entrances and none yielding an actual exit from the living hell. And usually waiting on the other side is the unsettling “Screaming Woman” (Cassandre Girard), who relentlessly stalks after Kait. Much like addiction, the Screaming Woman is a monster Kait cannot escape nor reason with.
Even with a succint run time of just 70 minutes, Puzzle Box says a lot on the nature of addiction. It touches on the never-ending cycle of self-destruction, the estrangement from loved ones, and facing the consequences of your past misdeeds. And solemnly, the film makes clear that some mistakes prove fatal and cannot be rectified.
Puzzle Box is available to stream through August 20 via The Popcorn Frights film festival.
Beats, Boxing and Mayhem 