Name: Heaven Knows What
Genre: Drama, Crime
Released: 2014-08-29T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Eléonore Hendricks, Buddy Duress, Necro

Arielle Holmes was living on the streets of Manhattan, addicted to heroin and bound to a boyfriend she could not leave, when Josh Safdie met her and encouraged her to write it all down. Those pages became Mad Love in New York City, a memoir still unpublished when Josh and his brother Benny turned it into Heaven Knows What. Holmes did not hand her story to an actress. She plays Harley, a thinly renamed version of herself, opposite Caleb Landry Jones as Ilya.

That decision is the film’s argument, and it has aged into something heavier than a calling card. Heaven Knows What stands at the start of the Safdies’ New York cycle, before Good Time and Uncut Gems made their version of the city a recognisable signature, and long before the brothers went their separate ways. It now opens in South Korea, where its campaign sells it as the first chapter of a New York trilogy, just after the most decorated season either brother has had: Josh’s Marty Supreme drew nine Oscar nominations, and Benny won the Silver Lion for best director at Venice with The Smashing Machine. The question the film raised on its first festival tour has not gone away. What does a camera owe the person it asks to replay the worst stretch of her life?

The casting tells you what kind of film this wanted to be. Holmes had never acted. Buddy Duress, who plays Mike, came to the production shortly after his release from Rikers Island and met Josh Safdie through Holmes; he would return as Ray, the hospital escapee Robert Pattinson drags through Good Time. Around these first-timers the Safdies placed one trained actor with a career already moving, Jones, whose Ilya the film’s own synopsis describes as an unstable boyfriend drifting in and out of Harley’s life. The ratio is the method. The professional is outnumbered, asked to fit himself into a world the people around him had actually lived.

Read against the Safdie filmography, Heaven Knows What is the hinge. Before it came small, loose portraits of New Yorkers getting through their days, Josh’s The Pleasure of Being Robbed and the brothers’ Daddy Longlegs. After it came the genre engines: the one-night chase of Good Time, the gambling spiral of Uncut Gems. Ronald Bronstein, who co-wrote this script with Josh Safdie, stayed on as the constant collaborator through all of them, up to Marty Supreme, and cinematographer Sean Price Williams went straight from this film to Good Time. The older lineage the premise invites is The Panic in Needle Park, Jerry Schatzberg’s heroin romance on the Upper West Side, and the American street cinema that took real locations and non-professionals as raw material. What the Safdies added was a pact with their lead that fiction usually keeps at arm’s length.

Critics who caught it on the festival circuit pointed to choices that would harden into house style. In The Hollywood Reporter, David Rooney noted a soundtrack built largely from Isao Tomita’s electronic arrangements of Debussy, cut with Tangerine Dream, hardstyle and black metal; the credited composers are Ariel Pink and Paul Grimstad. The Korean coverage of this release singles out a camera that sticks close to its street characters and a deliberately rough digital image. In Slant, Kenji Fujishima called it “one of the most harrowing cinematic depictions of drug addiction in recent memory.” Juries agreed: after its premiere in the Orizzonti section at Venice, it took the Grand Prix and the best director prize at the Tokyo International Film Festival.

None of this settles the problem at the film’s centre. Casting Holmes as herself buys an authority no screenplay could fake, but the film cannot tell us, and does not try to, how much distance a young woman so close to that life had from the version of herself she was asked to perform. The dedication makes the stakes concrete. Heaven Knows What is dedicated to Ilya Leontyev, Holmes’s former boyfriend, who was found dead of an overdose in Central Park weeks before the American release. Duress died at 38, of what his brother described as cardiac arrest from a drug cocktail. A retrospective campaign built on the word trilogy also smooths over how far this film sits from the polish of Uncut Gems: it grossed $84,417 in American cinemas, and its reputation was assembled afterwards, by critics and by the brothers’ later success.

Still from Heaven Knows What, the 2014 New York street drama directed by Josh and Benny Safdie — A street scene from *Heaven Knows What* (2014), directed by Josh and Benny Safdie

Heaven Knows What opens in South Korean cinemas on October 14, 2026, with a new local poster built around a close-up of Harley and a trailer cut to hardstyle. The credited cast includes Arielle Holmes, Caleb Landry Jones, Buddy Duress, Eléonore Hendricks and the rapper Necro. Written by Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein, it is a French-American production from Elara Pictures and Iconoclast. The film premiered at Venice on August 29, 2014, and RADiUS-TWC released it in American theatres on May 29, 2015. No new release has been announced in the United States or other English-language markets.

More than a decade on, the brothers who made it no longer work as a pair, and two of the people whose lives it borrowed are gone. Korea is receiving the film as the first chapter of a career. For the people on screen, it was the record of a life.