‘Shuffle’ Review: Recovering Addicts Become Prey in Benjamin Flaherty’s Moving Exposé on Rehabilitation Facilities Designed to Fail

Part addiction self-portrait, part medical exposé, Benjamin Flaherty’s powerful, essayistic “Shuffle” was the winner of this year’s Documentary Feature Competition at SXSW. The film offers an intimate chronicle of three drug users and several whistleblowers trying to turn over new leaves, as they gradually paint a chilling portrait of a predatory system of faux-recovery.
Focusing on a number of rehab facilities in Florida, “Shuffle” weaves together a detailed fabric of the “who,” “how” and “why” concerning the structural abuse of addicts seeking recovery. It’s a film about fraud built upon fraud, with organizations claiming to care about drug users but systematically ensuring they relapse, all the while wringing them and their insurers for all they’re worth. Essentially, it’s a dynamic that reduces people into products and insurance policies first, but Flaherty uses his camera to re-humanize them.