Critics reviews

The honesty of Holmes' writing carried over into an exceptionally raw and believable performance as Harley, her onscreen alter-ego.

The film shares a milieu with Larry Clark's Kids, but bypasses the initial seductive outlaw glamour of heroin in favour of plunging into the jarring chaos of addict life. It's a tough, frequently unpleasant watch. A score of jabbing electronica tips the audience off kilter and the characters are not easy people to care about. The attrition of addiction has worn away their personalities, leaving just a gaping, unlovely need.

As the film creeps towards his sudden conclusion, it seems like the Safdies have nestled a subtle, Romeo and Juliet-like love story at the film's core. It's why this film is beautiful.

For all the raw horror it depicts, Heaven Knows What is skilful at showing hope while offering little of it... At one point the camera closes in on Harley's bitten, dirty and trembling fingertips as she tries and fails to thread a needle to mend Ilya's jacket – an exquisitely judged moment that shows her desperation and her failure to connect; the hopelessness of her love, and the tenacity of her investment in it; the needle and the damage is done.

Whereas Magic Mike XXL is rich with pleasures, the Safdies' gutter-level addiction chronicle is rich with miseries. Not unlike Horse Money, it's a movie that mixes and matches its fictions and realities into a patchwork of caustic realism.

The style of Heaven Knows What is striking. It's documentary, cinema verite stuff, and the cameras sometimes seem to have been placed across the street, capturing the characters' arguments from a distance. It's effective because the style places them in the outside world, with New Yorkers passing by, never looking over.

I remember someone like Burroughs saying that addiction had a very organizing effect on one's life, to wit, you got up whenever you got up knowing that you had to do two things that day: cop and shoot up. Everything else is leisure time. I have not seen another film that put across the algebra of need so pitilessly and accurately. A horrific masterpiece.

Interplay between documentary and fiction is hardly new as a concept, but there is still exciting ground to be covered within that intersection. A case in point is Joshua and Ben Safdie's Heaven Knows What, a brilliant piece of psychodrama that – through its re-enactment of scenes from the lives of New York drug addicts, playing themselves – functions as both pseudo-vérité and, well, vérité.

Its episodic, visceral style embodies a fierce, gut-driven authenticity and flair increasingly hard to find in US indies.

[The Safdies] present us with an accurately bleak portrait of the stark reality of life as a heroin addict, leaving us to draw our own conclusions from the tale, bringing to the project our own biases. It's a difficult film, but an important one, and far more confronting and eye-opening than any Sunday special-esque heroin film could ever be – all while managing to never demonize or condone the behaviour of its participants.

[The Safdies'] film is the latest in a long line of movies that seem to assume the milieu of addiction is justification enough for its existence. The result is a work that—like a whole sub-species of French films of the recent decades—fetishizes its own hyper-naturalistic visual style and performances (all but one by non-actors) while offering no original or striking insights into the world it portrays.

One junkie story tends to be much like another, so give brothers Josh and Benny Safdie credit for crafting one that's genuinely distinctive... [Holmes'] live-wire performance (opposite one professional actor and a lot of other non-pros) gives Heaven Knows What an electrifying immediacy that sets it apart from the usual cycle of stealing, scoring, and fixing. And the real-life aspect has been supplemented by aggressively formalist technique, lending it still more power.