THE ADDICTION

GRADE: B+

So with The Addiction, Ferrara sinks his teeth into a moral fable that equates bloodlust with amorality and postulates that there may, even now, be salvation for the sinner. Shadow-slinker Anabella Sciorra nails star Lili Taylor early on, dragging her into an appropriately chiaroscuro corner of Greenwich Village and biting her, hard. Taylor, who plays a philosophy grad student at New York University, acquires the vampire's thirst for blood and starts stalking the campus, preying on the victims who are weak enough not to tell her just once, with feeling: get away from me.

The movie progresses more or less as a series of episodes detailing Taylor's interactions with old friends, professors and other potential victims, and even other vampires. Before long, she's adopted the cool black-clad cigs-and-sunglasses attitude of a fashionable junkie and starts to ruminate weirdly on the Meaning of it All.

The NYU setting defuses a problem Ferrara movies have been having with dialogue lately; in this movie, the characters talk like pretentious philosophy students because that's what they are, and it makes all the difference when Taylor seduces a sweet young thing at the movie's midpoint by inviting her upstairs to study Feuerbach. The movie's wildly literate bent comes to a wacky fruition during a key scene featuring Walken in a longish cameo. Discussing the nature of blood addiction, and giving Taylor metaphysical tips on ways to best deal with her habit and the attendant immortality, Walken gets animated and lurches toward her with feeling. "Have you read Naked Lunch?"

Walken's presence is welcome, even though Taylor is quite capable of handling her part without a helping hand. Ferrara's forte lately has been coaxing anguished performances from his stars, and the camera here lingers on Taylor, framing her body dispassionately as it wracks and convulses, or as she crawls across the floor in the throes of her addiction. This isn't to say that you should expect a full-frontal Keitelian assault, but Taylor is excellent, and she provides a necessary dollop of humanity within Ferrara's big picture.

Shot entirely in black and white, Ferrara's New York is used here mainly for backdrop and attitude. There's no real sense of location, but this is the kind of story you'd hardly expect to see anywhere else. The photography is mostly rich and evocative, but occasionally heavyhanded. You wish, for instance, that someone would reach up and turn on a light during Taylor and Sciorra's first encounter. It takes a little while for The Addiction to get going, and the overly mannered dialogue may have your eyelids dropping if you're up past bedtime. Fortunately, when the going gets weird, it's weird enough to make you care where Ferrara and St. John are taking you.

The Addiction culminates in two major scenes, one of them being an over-the-top party sequence that recalls the climax of my favorite Ferrara film, Ms. 45. That first scene leads directly into the second, which is the allegorical climax, complete with a priest and communion wafers. It'll be no surprise to anyone who's seen Bad Lieutenant that Ferrara is most concerned here with the concepts of sin and redemption, and while the last moments of The Addiction are a little obscure, he follows through, perhaps shoring up a new reputation as one of New York's foremost gloomy optimists.