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Film on the Internet: π (1998) on Amazon Prime

Posted By Grant Nebel ("wallflower") on October 16, 2017 in Reviews | 54 Responses

“Torah’s just a long string of numbers.  Some say it’s a code, sent to us from God.”

This was Darren Aronofsky’s debut, and right away he established that he had no interest in realism–all his most characteristic films are about a level of reality more real than the one we live in.  His clearest forerunner is David Lynch, but Aronofsky is a much more rigorous director. π is work of what could be called philosophical horror, a kind of fusion of Lovecraft and Kabbalah.  Max (Sean Gullette) is a mathematician searching for the the code behind all reality, and in one moment, he finds it, and that makes him the target of everyone from Wall Street manipulators to a group of rabbis to his own brain.  It may all be a conspiracy from well before the beginning of the film, or it could be Max’s hallucination from start to finish.

It’s an astonishingly confident film; Aronofsky throws us into Max’s headspace with the titles and the first sequence and keeps us there the whole time.  One of his inheritances from Lynch is an enveloping, never-silent sound design (including an electronica score from Clint Mansell and others) that’s straight outta Eraserhead; visually, he goes past that, with Matthew Libatique contributing super-high-contrast black-and-white cinematography that gets jumbled with shaking camera, repeated images, extreme close-ups, and shifts to full black and full white.  None of this is for show; as much as Gullette’s nervy performance, π makes us as disoriented, fearful, and hypersensitive as Max.  It’s like a 90-minute visualization of a migraine attack.  No one who saw this would have been surprised by Requiem for a Dream, Noah, The Fountain, or mother!

The mathematical underpinnings (and a great supporting performance by the ever-reliable Mark Margolis, best known to most of us as Uncle Tio on Breaking Bad) keep a sense of order that’s necessary to horror.  If you just show random things happening, there’s nothing to fear; but the underpinning idea here is that “mathematics is the language of nature” and it’s a real possibility that Max has crossed into God’s territory and he’s getting hunted down for it.  Compare this to A Beautiful Mind and you can really see the how effective it is, because Aronofsky takes the mystery and power of numbers seriously–and π is the most mysterious and powerful number of all.  (Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan used a similar idea for the end of their novel Contact, which didn’t make it to the film.  I wonder if Aronofsky was inspired by them.)

π streams free on Amazon Prime.

Posted in Reviews | Tagged Clint Mansell, Darren Aronofsky, Film on the Internet, Horror, Judaism, Mark Margolis, Matthew Libatique, Pi, Sean Gullette, π

About the Author

luzzaschi27@aol.com'

Grant Nebel (“wallflower”)

A Silver Age (2007) commenter from the AV Club who crossed over to the Dissolve at its inception in 2013. You can follow his writings here and in the comment section at The Dissolve, and his music on his Soundcloud channel (see any Soundtracking here for that).

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