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Absolutely gut-wrenching and difficult from beginning to end, to long after you have watched this film! Very few films can worm themselves into a person?s psyche, but this one is more than capable: script, sound, music, photography, acting, theme, presentation all conspiring to tell a story that will resonate at the darker edges of our humanity. Nicolas Cage as Ben is a tour-de-force making Ray Milland (The Lost Weekend) look placid. Sera (Elisabeth Shue), a prostitute, complimented Cage as a heart-breaking character of despair and destruction. Both are bent on self-annihilation. Together they spell out a complex mixture of pain, fear, nihilistic and morbid thinking, failure, loss, and an absence of sanity. This story has more to do with relationships and love than with sex and more to do with holding on than with letting go, but such is buried deep within the chasm where death is no longer frightening and life is no longer worthwhile. You will be stunned.