Movie Review – Requiem (Dreams, Shortcuts, and the Price of Addiction)

Requiem follows a group of characters who try to fulfill their dreams through drug addiction, only to lose everything to addiction. Through their tragic endings, the movie warns of the dangers of addiction and the consequences of taking false shortcuts to fulfill dreams, and explores the deep relationship between human deprivation and addiction.

 

One of the world’s most troubling issues these days is drugs. Even Korea, which was known as a drug-free country, is constantly in the news for celebrity drug issues and youth drug cases. Unlike other films that deal with this issue as a social and criminal problem, Requiem focuses on the story of each individual addicted to drugs. This makes it feel more realistic, and the severity of addiction and the destructive consequences of drugs doesn’t feel like a story about someone else. Each of the protagonists were not people who gave up on life and started using drugs because they had no plans, but all of them had ‘dreams’. We’ll explore how dreams and addiction are the central themes of the film, and how some of them ended up not being able to dream anymore.
Harry, Sarah, Marion, and Tyrone all have dreams. Harry’s dream is to make money and Sarah’s is to be on her favorite TV show. Marion’s dream is to open her own clothing store, and Tyrone’s is not exactly defined but can be seen as family love. They use drug distribution and diet pills as tools for their dreams. However, they become addicted to the ‘drugs’ they use as tools, and in the end, the dreams disappear and the addiction remains. Prison, psychiatric hospitals, and the sex trade are the only options for these drug addicts.

 

 

Why did they turn to drugs? The main characters all have dreams but lack the ability to act on them. Sarah turns to drugs because she can’t control her appetite after trying to diet, and Harry, Marion, and Tyrone turn to drugs because they want to make a quick buck. In other words, they’re all looking for a shortcut, and they’re all lost. It’s important to note that they didn’t just choose a shortcut; social pressures and external expectations also influenced their choices. In the modern world, we are constantly being asked to succeed and achieve, and this pressure can lead people to make risky choices in order to achieve quick success. In the case of Harry and Marion, the tragedy is that their dreams were not simply driven by personal goals, but were shaped by their surroundings and social norms. This ultimately led to the destruction of their lives and kept them in a cycle of addiction.
The reason for their addiction is similar to the human psychology of looking for shortcuts, so I wondered if they chose drugs as their tool. Drugs bring a lot of pleasure without much effort. Isn’t this a form of looking for shortcuts or workarounds to get things done without much effort? We can look at addiction in the same way. When you’ve had the easy way out, hard work and labor seem harder, which is why you look for alternatives to the straight path. Also, when you do less and less hard work, your standards naturally get lower and lower, and your willpower gets weaker and weaker. It’s a bit like becoming tolerant to a drug and looking for stronger drugs.
This comparison between drugs and human behavior made me think that addiction in humans can occur in any situation. In addition to the addictions to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco that we often think of, we can also become addicted to relationships and dreams. We become addicted to abnormal relationships, and we become addicted to our own blind goals and dreams. So how do we define addiction? The common thread in all of these situations is that addiction is blindly falling in love with one thing and losing something else. The movie uses drugs, the most extreme of all addictions, to warn us about the problem of addiction itself.

 

 

The question then became, why do people become addicted? If we look at simple addiction, we can say that we are addicted for pleasure and fun. However, this movie made me think that maybe we become addicted because of a lack. Harry’s dream is to make money, but it’s a deficit. His real dream is to live happily with his mother, Sarah, and his girlfriend, Marion. But he doesn’t have enough money to fulfill this dream, so his desire to make money becomes more and more like a dream. Sarah’s dream of being on a television show is also driven by a lack of love. In the movie, Sarah is struggling with feelings of emptiness and unloved after her husband dies and her son leaves her. She doesn’t know how to deal with these feelings, so she becomes even more obsessed with appearing on the show, which is why she becomes addicted to dieting. Marion is similar. He was born into a wealthy family but has a deficit of not being loved and accepted for who he is. Tyrone continues to long for his mother’s arms as a child; for him, the deficit is family. Each of these people has a need, but they don’t know how to fulfill it properly, or they find a shortcut, and it becomes an addiction.
The title of the movie is also noteworthy. “Requiem” means a mass for the dead. The title makes it immediately clear who the movie is singing a funeral dirge for. ‘Requiem for a dream’ is a requiem for a dream. While this is a reference to the main characters’ dreams that are lost to drugs, it can also be seen as a hymn for other things that are lost to addiction. This hymn is not just about individual dreams, but also about the values that are lost to society as a whole. In a society where addiction is rampant, not only individual dreams are lost, but also important values such as humanity, morality, and community solidarity. The movie criticizes these social issues and makes us consider how individual addiction is intertwined with social structures. The main characters not only lose their dreams to addiction, but also their health, relationships, and love. This is a typical downside of addiction. When you’re addicted to one thing, you lose sight of other values. You lose sight of your surroundings, and before you know it, they’re gone. I think that’s why I chose the title of the work as a kind of anthem for all those things.
‘Requiem’ provides an experiential experience that makes the viewer feel like they’re on drugs with its flashy editing and cuts. I think the reason for this is to make the viewer feel more directly that anyone can be in the same situation as the protagonist. We all have our own deficiencies. We also have goals and dreams, and we want to solve them in our own way. But what we always have to be wary of is whether it’s the right way, whether I’m recognizing the deficiency, whether I’m taking the easy way out, whether I’m too focused on the end. This is a movie that makes me think twice about whether I’m unknowingly becoming addicted and losing something else important.