I think it's unavoidable that I have to process my recent ADHD diagnosis at some point in these reviews, since I've been writing them almost daily for all of 2022. This one's a good space to reflect since the film itself was a straightforward Northern twist on the quickly-emerging slasher formula in British horror—I'd rather talk about the band who shares its name anyway.

The opening of Loveless is seared in my mind thanks to teenage writing sessions where I would listen to Only Shallow's riff on repeat for hours, finding myself saturated in enough stimuli to stay focused. That riff was reinforced in my memory further by the opening theme of Sound Opinions, a radio show I would download as a podcast and obsessively catalog the music for. My very first hobby was reading—I was desperate to learn in ways that engaged me, to consume more at a cadence that I could soothe myself with. The next hobby that flourished on similar soil was music, which washed over me as a passionate obsession when I was a teenager. Music became a key path for how I could cling on to connections with peers. Any interest I took up was fueled through these intense desires to apprehend more of a medium, to hold on to the totality of something in my mind.

My drive for film comes from a similar place. If I want cinemaphilia to stay a dopamine bath in the long-term, the way that music and fiction serve as for me, then I need to keep learning more about film and I need to keep challenging myself to expand my understandings of the art form.

My interests live in a crank jutting out of my stomach, and I wind the handle again and again to keep me out of sight from the turmoil of emotion I avoided for so long. Obsessions fuel me to think and act and do at a furious pace in the best of moments, but I jutter to a stop in others when my interests can't turn over. That's when I have to find one of the more granular angles within an interest to keep me going—devouring an entire book series, seeing an intense number of films starring actor Nicolas Cage, putting the Loveless album on loop until I could feel again.

So, Loveless reminds me of what it was like when I wanted to swallow the world whole. What else have I had to deny within myself since then? I'm learning in my 30s that, even now, I know nothing about how my brain works. When I'm faced with such a sudden pivot in knowledge, where do I go from here? What do I do with an ADHD diagnosis?

The answer involves, apparently, learning to love how I love to learn. I'm glad I watched 50 new-to-me horror films this spooky season.