PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 11/17/06)

More Photos of Heath Ledger

After a slew of Hollywood "it boy" roles in The Patriot, and A Knights Tale, Heath Ledger turned to indie fare like Mark Forster's Monster's Ball and his Oscar nominated performance in Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain. In Candy, his follow up to Brokeback, he's taking another gamble. This adaptation of Aussie writer Luke Davies' novel stars Ledger as Dan, a junkie, and his equally addicted artist girlfriend, Candy (Abbie Cornish). They are desperately in love and their heroin habits plunge them into the hopelessness of the city's underworld.

Other films in the junkie genre have dished up harrowing sequences of addiction and withdrawal, but Candy offers no respite. It's a raw, powerful and emotionally grueling. A withdrawal sequence is as painful as the one in Trainspotting but without its wink and comedic relief. Here it is followed directly by a harrowing stillborn labor sequence. Mind you, this is all before the film transitions into what it considers "hell." Like Requiem for a Dream, the situation gets increasingly bleak and when the film ends, you may want to stay in the dark theater where they can simply dig a hole under their seats and not have to face the bad, bad world. But whereas Requiem was a complex, interweaving narrative, Candy never blinks from this one fairly straightforward storyline.

Director Neil Armfield uses a whole bag of cinematic tricks, like shooting through water and glass to show his characters' distorted viewpoints. In the opening sequence he shows the giggling lovers in an amusement park Gravitron, spinning increasingly faster as they are pinned to the walls. They are unphased by their unearthly surroundings as Armfiled tells us he is following them into chaos. Indeed, the film's titlecards are subtle as a hammer, breaking the film into three acts: "Heaven," "Earth" finally "Holle" (aka Hell).

Ledger's narration explains "The world is very bewildering to a junkie," and as Candy shows, junkies are bewildering to the world. Ledger turns in another stellar performance and Cornish is heartbreakingly good also in this well-crafted film. But once that first plunger is pushed, the surprises are few.

— Scott Warren