An unflinching plunge into dark territory, feeling strangely, and painfully, relevant to unhealthy pastimes from our collective youth.
Walton and Deng manage to spectacularly craft uncomfortably beautiful compositions, conveying a sad inner distress easily recognized as a terribly incessant and subconscious longing to avoid sobriety at all costs - yet it's still frightening.
While these moments, captured through Deng's appropriately hazy cinematography, endure long enough to fundamentally represent a depressed view of life, they never culminate in a solution for Deng's character.
In short, it comes down to a matter of taste. The production of "a strange place" - its technical aspects, I mean - may say more about its narrative than its own narrative does. Whether that is a good or bad thing: it is up to you.