The Drug Becomes the Demon: ‘Pieces of Amy’ Spins Addiction as a Supernatural Possession
Image credits: Pieces of Amy
If the last decade of “elevated horror” – where every ghost and ghoul doubles as a metaphor for trauma – has started to feel like therapy with a body count, Pieces of Amy refuses to turn away from the abyss. And where more recent films seem eager to resurrect the jump scare era, this genre-bending directorial debut twists a dense psychological crime thriller around a supernatural horror that attempts to expose the literal nightmares of opioid addiction. There’s serious questions about the scale of the endeavor (tackling sexuality, race, class, and mental illness in one film). And then of course there’s that one scene that allegedly left audiences and crew members nauseous asking: “what kind of movie is this anyways?”
Despite its hunger for the void, Pieces of Amy is a fun, gripping, character-driven story about a young OxyContin addict who finds herself literally possessed by her own demons. Buoyed by the performances of an incredible cast of newcomers, it is one part theater piece, one part whodunit, one part bloodthirsty body horror. The drama draws us into an intricate, braided house-of-mirrors, until we forget we’re watching a horror film. One moment we’re enveloped in a queer coming-of-age story about a woman fleeing the trauma of the high desert, and in the next we’re trapped in a violent fever dream with eroticized flesh wounds. I wont spoil the surprise (or the nausea) but it brings up problematic questions of the “male gaze” for first time writer/director Timothy Shea: Are we watching Blue is the Warmest Color, or are we watching Wild Things?
Ultimately the high-concept project is grounded in the outstanding performances of its cast. Shelby Parks (Lincoln Lawyer, Good Trouble) is mesmerizing on screen as Amy, who plots and schemes her way through one self-inflicted disaster to the next, bumping OxyContin and trying to score 30 grand to save her kidnapped mother. She constantly locks horns with her hard-headed brother Brian – played by K.C. Wolf (Yesterday), the film’s unshakable center of gravity – who alternately cares for her and gaslights her. Each face off between the two siblings is an explosive tug of war that sucks us back into the crime thriller, taking our attention away from the impending horror.
That is, until Amy and Brian collide into Taylor (Gabby Thomas), a disarming con artist moonlighting as a model. And Angelo (Stephon Mitchell), a rich, lecherous photographer who lures in young girls and spins cryptic stories that seem one part criminal, and one part photo concept. Brian wants out. But Amy sees an opening to get the money for her Mom. Except Angelo’s got a dark supernatural secret. And that’s when things get weird.
Like, really weird.
Angelo’s possession spreads to Amy and the plot folds back in on itself. There’s a (spoiler alert) “infinite time loop” trapping Amy in a recursive nightmare, mirroring Amy’s own inability to escape her cycle of self-destructive addiction. Lost inside her own fever-dream-within-a-fever-dream, we begin to doubt the details of the whodunit. Is her Mom still alive? And who stole the 30 grand anyways? The film teases conventional answers – pointing fingers at Angelo, at Taylor, at the drug dealers circling in the margins – but as the clues pile up and refract inside of the story’s sprawling infinity mirror, we’re forced to ask which of these “pieces” of Amy’s story are real, and which are just hallucinations.
Which one supposes is the whole point? People don’t believe addicts, manics, schizophrenics, and yet here the audience is squarely inside their mind. One can see how terrifying it must be. To believe they’re being followed, to feel that something is inside of them, to plead that they only need one more shot to fix everything. The audience knows something horrible is happening, they see the demon on screen, but the urgent details of the thriller keep pulling our attention away from properly addressing it.
It’s quite a feat, the way the film forces one to confront these social epidemics and own prejudices, by having them ride shotgun on the heist. But it is maddeningly complex. Amy and Angelo’s stories circle each other like a Yin and Yang, but who exactly is haunting whom? Is Amy an apparition from Angelo’s distant past? Or is Angelo a vampire in Amy’s present nightmare? Is it an important detail that Angelo is the only black character, that the audience is asked to assume he is the antagonist: depraved, chauvinistic, and dangerous? And when it’s revealed that he too is just a victim of “the possession”, should the audience feel badly about their prejudices? Is the extra political framing necessary?
And if the point is to critique society’s mismanagement of the opioid crisis, what should the audience make of that one scene? Taylor is ultimately the one to break Amy & Angelo out of their orbit. She lures Amy in, she sets the heist in motion, and then seduces her. When the inevitable betrayal occurs, we descend into gore. Here are two consenting women, flirting around the perimeter of romantic intimacy. Was this merely the director’s chance to shoehorn in a grim David Cronenberg on ayahuasca moment? Or is this his commentary on the way male-directed horror often exploits gendered violence as an aesthetic, made into spectacle divorced from real life consequences?
Regardless, the film is unflinching about its ambitions, and bulldozes past ‘elevated horror’ tropes, creating a transgressive new vision for the medium.