Pi

Rating: 5/10 (20 July 2014)

This was the debut film from director Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, Noah), and I found it in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I was looking forward to seeing what it would be like. Basically in Manhattan, since childhood Maximillian 'Max' Cohen (Sean Gullette), a genius mathematician and computer expert, has suffered from severe migraines and takes pills to ease the pain of these headaches, this is since staring into the sun at the age of six and almost becoming blind, he also has extreme paranoia, hallucinations, and social anxiety disorder. He is a lonely man, living alone in his apartment with a supercomputer he built himself, his only friend is his former mathematics mentor and professor Sol Robeson (Ace Ventura: Pet Detective's Mark Margolis), and he is obsessed with finding numeric patterns. Max believes that mathematics is the language of nature, everything around people can be represented and understood from numbers, if you graph the numbers in any system then patterns emerge, therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature, and his current obsession is the Wall Street stock market and traders and their system to predict their behaviour. While he is being approached by a Wall Street company with high interest in his research and results of his studies, he keeps running into fast-talking Chasidic Torah scholar Lenny Meyer (Ben Shenkman) who also does mathematical research, and believes that a string of numbers, 216, is a code sent from God, and could hold the key to the meaning of life. As time goes by Max is driven to the brink of madness as he becomes obsessed with finding patterns that bring him towards the meaning of the numbers for this code, he shaves his head, he finds Sol dead, he keeps scribbling and calculating trying to find the answer, and in the end Max trashes the apartment and commits suicide with a power drill into his cerebral hemisphere. Also starring Pamela Hart as Marcy Dawson, Stephen Pearlman as Rabbi Cohen, Samia Shoaib as Devi, Ajay Naidu as Farrouhk and Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao as Jenna. In the leading role Gullette certainly convinces as the obsessive genius recluse slowly slipping from normality, the black and white colour and disorientating camera-work definitely add to the feeling of distortion, admittedly the deciphering and intricate ideas broken down by numbers is baffling and will confuse, but you cannot help but want to see what happens next, it is an interesting psychological science-fiction thriller. Worth watching!