Review of Human Traffic

There's a lot that's annoying about the film...the sound quality is poor, so that I kept turning the volume up but there's music track playing over a lot of the dialogue. There are annoying 'arty' techniques of characters speaking to the fourth wall and so on, and spoof documentary inserts. 

But it's also sort of likeable. It's a bit like Trainspotting, only with MDMA rather than Heroin at the centre. So the culture and the drug itself is more benevolent - the scene is mainly quite nice with lots of hugging of strangers, and good-looking young people dancing ecstatically (well, obviously). The five young people at the centre of the film are a bit messed up, but mainly in the way that young people are - one is jealous when his girlfriend interacts with other men, one is anxious about his sexual performance, and so on.  

For the most part it doesn't imply that they are messed up because of the drugs, and there's a nice insert from an actual stand-up comedian saying that he used drugs, he enjoyed it, and it didn't mess up his life or his career. But the young peope are all existing rather than thriving, in dead-end jobs or no jobs at all, and not on any ladders - career, property, whatever. There's a strong suggestion, amplified in the long shots over drab Cardiff at the end, that taking drugs and raving is a perfectly sensible response to the grim dullness of everyday life...and the young people seem to mainly understand that it relates to period in their life, and that it's not something that they will do forever.

The most miserable scenes in the film are in the post-party weed smoking session, where everyone is tired, ratty and paranoid. 

Obtained via informal distribution, watched via a USB stick stuck in the back of the smart TV.