I watched this a while ago now – before Indy IV, to be honest, I had to break a personal rule and push that review through first though. And it’s really hard to know what to say about this. It would’ve been a tough watch even before Heath Ledger’s death but obviously that adds a whole new dimension – more in the case of this movie, a movie about the destructive nature of drugs, than any other – to the impact it has.

To veer off on a wild tangent, it kind of reminded me of a gag in The Simpsons where Marge is walking around an independent movie festival. She says something along the lines of “all the movies with nice titles are nasty! That means I’ll like the ones with nasty titles,” and she emerges from one such movie and says, beaten, “I didn’t like it.” The title here might be Candy but it is not a sweet treat in any way, shape, or form. It’s a gruelling watch, a procedural look at a relationship reaching its inevitable end through the rise and inevitable collapse of a shared drug habit. You see it all, from an admittedly anomalously fun sequence of Ledger conning a man out of the entire contents of his bank accounts, through the movie’s most difficult to watch slog of cold turkey on the discovery that the girl is pregnant, to complete mental collapse and recovery only to come to the realisation, hey babe, we’re bad for each other.

In short, it’s undeniably great at doing what it does and documenting this kind of story – Ledger’s not alone in his great performance as Abbie Cornish is more than a match for him, Geoffrey Rush is perfect as the all too kind Uncle who arguably starts the whole thing, and the casting of Cornish’s mother I found incredible, their fight in the kitchen is jawdroppingly true. I just don’t see myself watching it ever again …