SXSW ‘25: Shuffle

In Austin-based filmmaker Benjamin Flaherty’s feature documentary debut, the lens is turned on both the seedy underbelly of addiction treatment centers and his own journey to sobriety. With Shuffle, which premiered at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, Flaherty adeptly straddles the line between documentarian and subject while uncovering a deep web of fraud and scams at the heart of addiction treatment.

Nicole M from Shuffle. | Credit: Benjamin Flaherty

In the opening scenes, Flaherty tells the story of his struggle with addiction and eventual rehabilitation, his voiceover accompanied by charming illustrations from animator Tom Sears. While he credited his stint in rehab with saving his life, Flaherty soon learned that many others lost their lives in the shuffle among treatment centers. So he sets off to South Florida, the so-called sober capital of the world, to find out why what worked for him is the death knell for others.

What ensues in the following 80-odd minutes is a taut insider’s look at the myriad of ways there are, as one interviewee puts it, “to make money off of somebody trying to get sober.” One of the first threads Flaherty follows is that of “body brokering”: treatment centers paying finder’s fees to brokers who refer insured patients to their facility. We get to see step-by-step how this happens, from the direct messages sent by brokers to people they find on Facebook to first-person accounts, delivered via silhouetted figures and voice-distortions, from the brokers themselves.

From there, the web of fraud unravels further. There’s the racket of over-billing for urine drug testing, the misuse of medicines meant to treat opioid dependence, the practice of quite literally auctioning patients off to the highest bidding treatment center. These multi-layered, too-devious-to-believe methods of fraud are grounded in the real-life stories Flaherty finds through his subjects. Cory, who at the start of the documentary has been in and out of Florida treatment centers for six or seven years, gets ensnared in different rehabs when they offer to pay thousands in cash for completing treatment. The problem with that, as Cory relates, is a newly sober rehab patient with $1,000 to spend likely won’t put it into savings, but into their drug of choice—and thus the cycle begins again. 

Then there’s 29-year-old Nicole, who by her count has been in 36 different rehab centers over eight years. In a striking moment, she rattles off the names of several fellow patients she’s known who died in treatment, and shares that nearly every center she went to had drug dealers lining the streets outside—and thus the cycle begins again.

Flaherty ties Nicole and Cory’s stories together along with Daniel, a young man from Tennessee whose mother is deeply invested in helping him find sobriety. These three become the heart of the documentary. It’s through their eyes and their stories that we learn the details of this outrageous scam churning billions of dollars out of the horrors of the opioid epidemic. And it’s through them that the human cost of that exploitation is made legible. 

It’s a somewhat dense subject to cover, but Shuffle uses every minute of its short runtime to set up the problem and all its many layers. Flaherty deftly switches from facts and figures—shown via illustrations and news clips—to interviews that drive home the reality of those millions of dollars, thousands of patients and hundreds of treatment centers. Similarly, the stories of Nicole, Cory, and Daniel are woven throughout the documentary, allowing their stories to unfold with equal space given to each subject.   

Near the end of the documentary, Flaherty uses a voiceover to openly address something it’s hard not to wonder about: What is it like, as a recently sober person, to know you’re one of the few lucky ones? How do you content with all the death surrounding you, all those who relapsed or overdosed? This vulnerability from the man behind the camera gives Shuffle a needed edge to elevate it from a simple piece of documentary journalism. He considers his role as a witness to, and maybe even an enabler of, that seemingly endless cycle trapping the trio he follows. It’s an open question, and one that makes the story told resonate all the more.

There are no easy answers in Shuffle. By the end of the documentary, we see updates on each of the three subjects: Daniel’s mother lets Flaherty know he passed away from an overdose. Cory and Nicole are sober, housed, employed and connected to family, and seem almost bewildered by their luck, in the same way as Flaherty himself. With the conclusion to their stories comes a resounding call to action to break the cycle and stop the shuffle.

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