Addicted movie review & film summary (2014)

The film opens with Zoe (Sharon Leal) getting out of her car wearing a fitted, houndstooth coat and giant sunglasses, walking in slo-mo towards a building as men turn to gaze at her appreciatively. She smiles back. She also fingers a mysterious scar on her wrist. She is going to meet with a psychiatrist for the first time. The psychiatrist (Tasha Smith, good in a thankless role) asks Zoe to tell her story. Zoe voiceovers that her life is perfect, and we are treated to a montage of playing charades with her family, and hot naked sex with her husband. ("He's my soulmate," says Zoe, as we watch the two of them writhe about in bed, an unintentionally comedic moment.) The hot-husband-sex is followed by Zoe sneaking down to watch porn on her laptop and masturbate. Masturbating, in the world of "Addicted," is a sign that something is deeply wrong in the marriage. Things aren't so perfect after all.

Zoe is an artists' rep who has her own company, and she is obsessed with signing a mysterious artist named Quinton Canosa (William Levy). When asked why she loves his work, this woman who supposedly has a background in art, says: "His stuff just grabs me in the gut, you know?" The two meet cute at a gallery, and he smolders at her meaningfully, bedroom-eyeing her instantly, and she blushes and acts flustered and yet available. Before you know it, they are having sex in his fabulous private studio, as well as in an empty warehouse where he shows her a mural he has been working on for years ("I've never shown this to anyone," he tells her with tears of vulnerability in his eyes.) Zoe starts sneaking around on her husband, and things with Quinton quickly become too complicated for her to handle. Not only is he always in some state of nudity, tempting her with his rock-hard abs, he is also tender and damaged.

The screenplay, by Ernie Barbarash and Christine Welsh, is both totally on-the-nose and totally a mess. Zoe races into the arms of her various lovers, neglecting her husband (Boris Kodjoe) and kids, giving herself over to the newness of her conquests, and it's all presented in as sexualized and erotic a way as possible. The sex is graphic, but in a "Red Shoe Diaries" kind of way. But "Addicted" also wants to shame and contain Zoe through the introduction of 12-step language and a back story that "explains" her behavior. It all feels stiff and imposed, as though suddenly "Addicted" remembered it wanted to be a Lifetime Movie of the Week that has a lesson for us all, instead of erotica that knows it wants to turn you on and has no shame about that.