Film
Heroin(e)
- Social drama
- Very dark
A 39-minute Oscar-nominated short following a fire chief, a judge, and a street missionary as they fight Huntington, West Virginia's opioid crisis from three different angles. There's no narration, no hand-wringing — just competent, exhausted people doing brutal, repetitive work with real compassion. Brisk, clear-eyed, and quietly devastating, it's for anyone who wants the epidemic explained as a systemic failure rather than a moral one, in under an hour.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you want a clear-eyed, humane look at addiction told through people doing hard jobs in a place that has run out of easy answers.
Skip it if you are after a broad investigation of how the drug trade works or a long, layered film; its focus on three people and short running time keeps it narrow.
What it asks of you: Thirty-nine minutes, mostly close and unhurried, with the weight carried by faces and silences rather than a fast flow of facts.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Dopesick2021
Traces the same crisis back to its source — the boardrooms and marketing campaigns that flooded towns like Huntington with pills — with Michael Keaton anchoring a furious, meticulous indictment of Purdue Pharma.
But It's angry and issue-driven rather than character-driven; eight hours of corporate villainy can feel like homework at times.
The Pharmacist2020
A grieving father turned amateur investigator takes on pill mills in Louisiana with the same dogged, unglamorous persistence Heroin(e)'s women would recognise instantly.
But Four episodes stretch a story that might have worked tighter; the pacing sags noticeably in the middle stretch.
Recovery Boys2018
Same state, same crisis, flipped perspective — this follows four men in recovery rather than the people trying to save them, with real tenderness and patience.
But It's slower and more meandering than Heroin(e), content to sit with uncertainty instead of building toward momentum.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Heroin(e)
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Panic in Needle Park1971
Same drug, same American cycle of crisis and official indifference, nearly fifty years earlier — proof this exact story keeps repeating with new names on the pill bottles.
Al Pacino, years before Scarface, playing a small-time heroin addict on New York's Upper West Side with a queasy, near-documentary intimacy that anticipates everything Heroin(e) is about.
But It's bleaker and more nihilistic, offering no institutional heroes — just two people going under together, slowly.
More like this (7)
Warning: This Drug May Kill You2017
A tighter, rawer HBO documentary that puts addicted people and their families front and center, unflinching about what opioids actually do to a household.
But Less structural, more purely emotional — if you wanted analysis over anguish, this leans hard toward anguish.
Painkiller2023
Netflix's dramatized, starrier take on the Purdue Pharma story, with Matthew Broderick and Uzo Aduba giving human faces to both the profiteers and the pursuers.
But Dramatization means some liberties; it trades documentary rigor for soapier, more theatrical storytelling choices throughout.
Oxyana2013
An earlier, rougher-edged look at an Appalachian town — Oceana, West Virginia — hollowed out by OxyContin, made before the crisis had a national name.
But No institutional heroes here, just despair up close; it's a harder, less hopeful watch than Heroin(e).
Beautiful Boy2018
Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet play out addiction from inside a family rather than a community, aching and specific rather than systemic in its focus.
But It's meth, not opioids specifically, and entirely domestic — you lose the wider social picture Heroin(e) gives you.
Ben Is Back2018
Julia Roberts and Lucas Hedges anchor a tense one-night story of a mother trying to keep her addicted son alive — small-scale, high-stakes, deeply human.
But It compresses a slow-motion crisis into one dramatic night, which can feel neat next to Heroin(e)'s real messiness.
Intervention2005
Same rescue narrative and same raw material, but stripped of Heroin(e)'s dignity — showing what this exact story becomes when it's sold as entertainment rather than witnessed as fact.
A long-running reality series that puts addiction interventions on camera, family by family — the trashier, more exploitative cousin of what Heroin(e) does with such restraint.
But It's manipulative and repetitive, often uncomfortably voyeuristic in ways the documentary you just watched carefully avoids.
Winter's Bone2010
Same terrain and same engine — Appalachian poverty metabolized into addiction — but fictionalized, so you feel the machinery from inside a story instead of watching it from outside as fact.
Jennifer Lawrence's breakout as a teenage girl navigating a meth-cooking Ozark community to save her family, with the same unglamorous, procedural eye for rural poverty and drugs.
But It's fiction, not documentary, and the drug is meth rather than opioids — the crisis is dramatized rather than witnessed firsthand.
People
Directing
- Elaine McMillion SheldonDirector
Production
- Curren SheldonProducer
- Elaine McMillion SheldonProducer
Recommended by
The Pharmacist, The Trade, The Crime of the Century, Aging Out, Web Junkie, Recovery Boys, Oxyana, Let's Get Lost, The Hottest August, A Certain Kind of Death, The Facebook Dilemma, A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness, Ramen Heads, Christmas, Again, The Goddess Project