Aronofsky's first film (Pi (DVD))

Member Name: shaneo632

Product:	Pi (DVD)
Date:	21/09/09 (3 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Brings a new director to prominence

Disadvantages: Slow paced

note: also appears in part on Flixster and The Student Room

PI is the film that shot director Darren Aronofsky to fame and allowed him to direct his better films Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, and The Wrestler most recently. It's a thrilling psycho noir that shows a lot of promise from a now huge director, with lots of hints of directors such as David Lynch and even Fritz Lang.

The film revolves around Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), a young mathematician who believes that numbers can be used to explain everything in life, from very simply things to the nature of our existence. He is currenly attempting to apply it to the stock market, looking for patterns that appear random but in fact are not. He is also very skilled at calculating complicated functions, and has a supercomputer at home that he uses to help with his maths work. Furthermore, he also suffers from some paranoid dellusions and mental issues, informing his extreme level of genius.

Although it's quite a slow moving film with little in the way of thrills, it's an undeniably intelligent film with a great central performance from Gullette, although strangely he never graduated to higher profile roles. The ending, though, is utterly searing, depraved, and unforgettably disturbing. The film depicts genius as a curse to one man, and he has to come up with a way to ease the headaches he gets, which he believes are linked directly to a series of numbers that he discovered to work in a pattern. It has earned numerous comparisons to Lynch's Eraserhead, although it's a far more focused and equally disturbing film that helped propel Aronofsky to fame.

This highly intelligent film requires patience, but those patient viewers will be rewarded. The climax is highly shocking, and I loved it.

Summary: A cracking, psychotic noir