Film Review: Drug Addiction Overwhelms Appalachia in ‘Hazard’
Writer/director Eddie Mensore’s Hazard exposes the damage that the opioid crisis is costing rural America, as seen through the eyes of its two protagonists.
Will (Alex Roe) spends his days wandering around his nearly abandoned town, either searching for drugs or under the influence himself. He makes sure that his coal miner father (Steven Ogg), who suffers from chronic pain, gets his regular fix.
Every day he goes to visit his wife, Sara (Sosie Bacon) and their young son. He longs to be part of the family again, but she’s forbidden him to come back home until he gets clean as she has. It’s clear, however, that her hold on sobriety is tenuous at best. She fears that he’ll drag her back into the addict’s life.
This town has clearly been ravaged by addiction. Every day, zombie-like citizens line up to get phony prescriptions from a shady doctor and exchange them for pills prescribed by an equally crooked pharmacist. Meanwhile, Sara’s police officer brother, John (Dave Davis), is trying to clean up the place, no matter how futile his efforts may be. He even enlists hid reluctant brother-in-law to help him find and arrest some local dealers, but Will makes only half-hearted efforts.
Mensore’s film clearly demonstrates the true banality of addiction. Misery is everywhere, and the pain lasts just long enough until another fix can be obtained. Drug-addled Will relives memories of happier times with his family instead of making new ones.
Not intended to be just another “movie of the week”-style shocker, Hazard tells its story with the quietly assured eye of someone who knows what it’s like to live in such a place. Even when terrible things happen, it nevertheless feels inevitable.
Roe and Bacon effectively portray the troubled couple, still in love with each other but facing different ends of the addiction spectrum. If some scenes in the film seem like clichés, it’s really unavoidable, since there’s nothing as numbingly repetitive as living like this.
Filmed on location in Harlan County, Kentucky (with cinematography by Matthew Boyd and production design by Michael McKowen), Hazard vividly captures the empty lives of a people in a town that’s in the process of slowly disappearing.
“I lifted the name because of the double meaning and it worked. Like if you guys were Harlan I still would have called it Hazard,” Mensore told WYMT. “I know that I took the name, but you know, it’s a universal story that all of us, every town in Appalachia, has been affected by this.”
Feature photo: Alex Roe as Will in Hazard (courtesy Ry Levey Film PR).
