Starring Lili Taylor, Christopher Walken, Annabella Sciorra, Edie Falco, Paul Calderón, Fredro Starr, Kathryn Erbe, and Michael Imperioli, the film follows a philosophy graduate student who is turned into a vampire after being bitten by a woman during a chance encounter on the streets of New York City.

[4][5] Kathleen Conklin, an introverted graduate student of philosophy at New York University, is attacked one night by a woman who calls herself "Casanova".

She grows aggressive in demeanor and propositions her dissertation advisor for sex at her apartment, stealing money from his wallet after he falls asleep.

Later on campus, Kathleen confronts Jean, rambling about the nature of guilt, before proceeding to bite her neck and drink her blood.

[6] Ferrara said in a 2018 interview that he intended the film to be an explicit metaphor for drug addiction; Ferrara had lived with a years-long addiction to heroin, and conceptualized the film as a Catholic redemption tale in which Kathleen, stricken by her lust for blood, accepts her powerlessness and submits to God before being reborn in the conclusion.

[7] The sequences inside Peina's home were shot in a loft owned by Julian Schnabel, who allowed Ferrara to film there.

[1] In addition to the thematic parallel to drug addiction noted by several critics and scholars, Slant Magazine's Ed Gonzalez considers the film "perhaps the most fabulously serpentine political work of Ferrara's career, a quivering nexus of AIDS allegory, identity crisis, historical unease, and socio-economic panic".

[10] Film critic Stephen Hunter interprets the film as a commentary on the world of academe, pointing out Kathleen's transformative disillusion with philosophy as a means of understanding the nature of good versus evil, "She's got a grudge against philosophy, which, in the long run, with all its constructs and rationalizations and insights, has proved somewhat inefficient as salvation".

[17] The Addiction grossed a total of $46,448 during its opening weekend, playing in seven cinemas in the United States, averaging $6,635 per theater.

The website's critical consensus reads: "Abel Ferrara's 1995 horror/suspense experiment blends urban vampire adventure with philosophical analysis to create a smart, idiosyncratic and undeniably odd take on the genre.

Although it undeniably helps, you don't have to know your Heidegger from Hamburger Helper to enjoy The Addiction as a grisly yet unusual thriller of the supernatural.

"[20] The Washington Post's Hal Hinson was less laudatory of Taylor's performance, writing that she "seems less distinctive here than she has been in past roles."

However, when he flashes images of historic atrocities of both the distant and recent past—Nazi death camps, the war dead in Bosnia—his ideas come across as shallow and banal.

Also, inserting scenes of real-life horror into what is essentially a glorified genre exercise may strike some as the essence of bad taste.

"[22] Stephen Hunter of The Baltimore Sun praised Taylor for portraying Kathleen "with dour, sexless intensity," and deemed the film "far sexier than Interview with the Vampire and far deadlier than the campy Nadja...