IMPRESSIVE DEBUT

Rating: Null/10 (26 October 2002)

The first film I saw of Aronofsky's was Requiem For a Dream, which I thought in all honesty was crap. It didn't explore anything new about drug addiction and it seemed as though they set out to make the most down beat film ever made (they succeeded). Pi, however, is far better. The look of the film, shot in grainy black and white, is very reminiscent of the brilliant and overlooked Tetsuo (an asian film).
It starts of as an exploration of a mad mathmatician (the excellent Sean Gullet) who tells us repeatedly that maths is the pattern of life. He attempts to crack the code, which he is certain contains 216 digits, and beleives that nature can be controlled when applying the code into a stream of accessible numbers and by applying letters.
Then the film kind of turns in on itself and heads (succesfully) into spiritual territory, followed by a very genuine (not to mention dark) decent into madness.
Don't be put off by the fact that the film is about maths, I detest maths as much as the next (imaginative, creative, non technically minded e.t.c) person, but watch it if you like artistic, underground film making made with real flair and imagination. Reccomended for avant garde film buffs everywhere.