Part addiction self-portrait, part medical exposé, Benjamin Flaherty’s powerful, essayistic “Shuffle” was the winner of this year’s Documentary Feature Competition at SXSW. The film offers an intimate chronicle of three drug users and several whistleblowers trying to turn over new leaves, as they gradually paint a chilling portrait of a predatory system of faux-recovery.
Focusing on a number of rehab facilities in Florida, “Shuffle” weaves together a detailed fabric of the “who,” “how” and “why” concerning the structural abuse of addicts seeking recovery. It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.
Flaherty is the film’s key narratory, but his primary subjects are twenty-somethings Cory, Nicole and Daniel, who he travels alongside over several years as they’re ping-ponged between different addiction facilities. Each of these places has its own expensive tests and routines, and its own profit structure that depends on its patients never getting well. Usually, there are only two ways out: joining the predatory pyramid to lure in new addicts, or dying. This series of interlocking journeys are made even eerier by Matthew Dougherty’s unnerving score.
What makes “Shuffle” especially empathetic is that it was made at a time when Flaherty was undergoing his own lengthy addiction treatment. He was lucky enough to not be caught in such a system. But, as the film goes on, it follows the money and reveals just how widespread these abuses are; Flaherty could have just as easily been a victim too.
The doc uses all the simple, traditional tricks of the form, between talking head interviews and B-roll footage, but its aim to convey facts and figures first is perhaps its biggest strength. Not only is it a vital exposé of and counter-narrative to destination wellness, but its litany of information is inherently shattering and enraging. His subjects relay their experiences with matter-of-fact frankness, as though they’ve told their stories too many times before, but no one has bothered to listen.
There’s a slickness to “Shuffle” that’s also nauseating, but only because it means to be. Its judicious use of animated interludes — resembling trembling chalk figures drawn on blackboards — paints portraits of isolation. Interviews with investigators and other parties invested in these cases use shifting, disorienting focus to disguise people’s physical details. Its archival montages, of lab rats and casino gambling, create disturbing parameters around the movie’s central trio, conveying how the world at large sees their struggles without using dialogue.
However, what is perhaps most chilling about “Shuffle” is its interviews with people responsible for finding addicts on social media and bringing them to the aforementioned facilities. These middlemen are shot in silhouette to hide their identities, and their voices are pitch-shifted down, but they take on a sinister tone and appearance in the process. We’re only given hints of physical details, like the shape of sunglasses, or spotlights bouncing off the contours of a beard. They resemble secretive Navy SEALs serving ruthlessly capitalist overlords, and their mission is recruitment.
All the while, Flaherty also questions his role in his subjects’ stories, and whether he’s merely an observer, some kind of interventionist, or, worse yet, an enabler. It’s the rare documentary that’ll leave viewers not just enraged and more informed, but arguably more emotionally intelligent too, given how much it wrestles with its own place in these people’s lives. The doc grants its subjects the kind of agency, dignity and complete personhood of which they’re so often robbed.
No matter how many gimmicks or flourishes the film employs — the vast majority of which are effective — “Shuffle” rarely wavers in its humanistic focus. The result of Flaherty simply hearing out people like Cory, Nicole and Daniel is shattering confessions and crescendos, which imbues the film with the kind of urgency that no fact or figure could hope to. It affords its subjects the chance to be heard, and for once, to not be forgotten.
