30/09/2024 - Spanish director Javier Giner presents a strong and courageous series based on his autobiographical novel of the same name

Javier Giner, a renowned press officer in the Spanish audiovisual industry, decides at the age of thirty to voluntarily enter a detoxification centre. At this time of complete darkness, after hitting rock bottom, he takes the decision to seek professional help driven by a desperate survival instinct. Without knowing it, this gesture will dramatically change his life. This is the story told in I, Addict [+see also:
trailer
series profile], the six-episode miniseries, directed by Giner himself together with Aitor Gabilondo (both creators of the series) and Elena Trapé, with the script also featuring Alba Carballal and Jorge Gil Munárriz. Based on the novel of the same name by the director and creator, it was presented at the 72nd San Sebastian International Film Festival as part of the special screenings.

Starring an impressive Oriol Pla in probably his best performance to date, the series tells the story of the protagonist’s downturn and the difficult recovery, healing and reconciliation with himself, who, after a long process of detoxification, managed to get out of the hell of drug and alcohol addiction. He starts off by portraying himself as someone with a clearly narcissistic, egocentric and despot behaviour and delving into some of the darkest episodes of his life. This is one of the great successes of the series, because from here Giner manages to go much further and discuss everything that lies behind this person who we initially might have disliked; his deep sadness and loneliness, self-destruction, dissatisfaction, emptiness, obsessions, deficiencies and unresolved (often inherited) traumas, hidden behind that appearance, and, with it, of the masks we all wear, of the crises we often carry and that we almost never know how to manage until they explode, we decide to ask for help or they stay locked inside us forever. Because as one revealing episode says, at its heart, the story is not about drugs or about oneself, but about learning to live, to live with any kind of addiction, illness or trauma.

Another of the series' greatest virtues is precisely this decision to tell the story as a story of survival rather than of overcoming. Giner manages to strike a difficult balance and to tell a very painful part of his life from the self. It avoids self-complacency, moralism, victimhood, sentimentality and easy self-help phrases, moving between different and complicated registers, from psychological drama (and even at times horror), emotional delicacy to a certain black humour. The creator undresses himself and takes us into his abysses. However, he knows when to be stark and when to be restrained, from an honest realism, powerful and simple at the same time (both in its substance and in its form), far removed from morbidity and unnecessary artifice.

The result is a fiction that manages to transcend the “I” that gives it its title and, from this intimacy, to tell with a singular truth a story that becomes universal, as well as reaching places seldom explored in audiovisuals. I, Addict is a series as devastating as it is brave, and at times beautiful. A journey from darkness to light that depicts the disease that is any kind of addiction, and shows that we are much more than the worst and the best that we have done in our lives. A series full of personality, which reveals a creator who is as interesting as he is brave.

I, Addict is an original production of Disney+ Spain (Star) in collaboration with Alea Media, which will be released on Disney+ in Spain.

(Translated from Spanish by Vicky York)