HABIT

Sam wanders the streets of New York. His life is marked by a past of drugs and a present of alcohol, parties, unstable and insecure romantic relationships. When he meets Anna, a new world opens up to him, a morbid world of unbridled sexuality and troubled passion, a blood bond that turns out to be a carrier of presumed vampirism. Anna bites Sam during sex, sucks his blood, little by little, and when Sam finally realizes the meaning of these gestures, he seeks comfort from his ex-girlfriend Liza and his brotherly friend Nick. It will end in tragedy, and it will leave us with the doubt: Was Anna really a vampire or, as Nick says trying to comfort his friend, "Unfortunately, vampires do not exist. Vampirism is everywhere, in the Faustian pacts we make every day"? Fessenden's second film, a sort of metropolitan female vampire, with many points in common with Ferrara's wonderful "The Addiction," shown through the chaotic and dirty life of the city (almost reminiscent of the first Scorsese), played by Fessenden himself, who this time also does not hesitate to fill the screen with ugly, unbearable, disgusting images (himself with his hair standing on end, the mouth without the front teeth and the cut lip), of a bestial and rough sexuality, and filters it all through a fast, schizophrenic, very modern direction, and an inconsistent but highly charming plot, with a hidden horror that little by little escapes until it explodes in the wide gore finale.