Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
This documentary follows three women — a fire chief, a judge, and a street missionary — as they battle West Virginia's devastating opioid epidemic.
Heroin(e) is a compact, affecting Netflix documentary that profiles three compelling women fighting the opioid crisis in Huntington, WV. The subject matter is urgent and the human portraits are genuinely moving, but the film's short runtime (39 min) limits narrative depth and its observational structure is fairly conventional for the documentary form. Cinematography is competent and intimate without being visually distinctive. The ending, constrained by an ongoing crisis with no resolution, feels appropriately honest but necessarily inconclusive and somewhat anticlimactic. Novelty is moderate — the three-women framing is a useful angle but the opioid documentary space is crowded.