‘The Addiction’ (R)

THERE MAY NOT be a more effortlessly powerful vampire flick than "The Addiction." Abel Ferrara's latest movie, set in an academic pocket of Manhattan and filmed in velvety black-and-white, is macabre and provocative, yet wonderfully restrained.

No one screams like a stuck ninny when someone gnaws into their blood supply, for instance. At a semi-conscious level, they're victims of their own free will, fascinated with evil and violence. And when Kathleen Conklin (Lili Taylor), the beguiling central character in this hypnotic film, suffers a vomitous transition from New York philosophy student to vampire, it's no cause for alarm. It's a fact of life, like morning sickness or, as the title indicates, drug addiction.

Conklin's entry into the vampire world occurs in swift, almost businesslike fashion, when a dark stranger called Casanova (Annabella Sciorra) pushes the student into a shadowy stairwell and has her way. Conklin, an academically rigorous student, seems oddly willing. She offers no resistance, just a faint "please," as if she were fated to this.

Conklin deserts her school life to pursue her primary interest. She starts squeamishly, extracting blood from a homeless man with a syringe, which she then injects into her own vein. But the blood lust drives her to a far less tentative approach. Soon, she's not only methodical about her habit, she's philosophical too.

"My indifference is not the concern here," she tells one of her victims, who protests Conklin's coldhearted treachery. "It's your astonishment that needs study."

"The Addiction," scripted by Ferrara's longtime collaborator Nicholas St. John, is only superficially about vampires. The Holocaust, the My Lai massacre, and the philosophy of Heidegger and Nietzsche are just some of the themes and ideas flitting batlike around this darkly inspired, quasi-religious dream. Ferrara (who made "King of New York" and "Bad Lieutenant") intersperses humor wherever possible. When new vampire Conklin, wearing dark glasses, returns after her initial absence to visit her philosophy professor (Paul Calderon), there's an unmistakable chuckle to be had—as in: Guess what I just changed into! After she has had dinner with him, spouting foreboding opinions and declaring the restaurant music depressing, the teacher confesses: "It hasn't been the most enjoyable evening, you know?"

The movie, which includes a brief but zesty appearance by Ferrara regular Christopher Walken, concludes humorously and rather beautifully, with a punch line of a finale that brings Conklin's PhD studies, her addiction and a lot of old friends ironically together. But "The Addiction" takes no goofy delight in the genre. Its straightforwardness sucks all hysteria out of the comedy. You don't laugh, so much as smirk, as you enjoy the presence of Taylor, whose intense, serene performance really makes its mark.

"She may look sweet now," said Abel Ferrara, referring to Taylor, as they introduced this movie at the Toronto Film Festival last month. "But she won't look so sweet once the movie's over." I respectfully disagree. She's all grace, throughout her addiction.

THE ADDICTION (R) — Contains relatively tasteful vampire assaults. In black-and-white.