Thrilling, intense, and cerebral

Rating: 10/10 (13 December 2018)

This is intense, cerebral, suspenseful, and visually thrilling. What more could you want from a low budget film? Shot in super grainy, high contrast black and white, Pi focuses on a brilliant but disturbed young man named Max Cohen. He lives in a little apartment in Chinatown, New York City that is packed with computer equipment, and spends his free time looking for a secret algorithm that underlies the changes in the stock market - or maybe even something more important, like life itself. He is befriended by another young man who is part of a mystical Jewish cult that thinks Max has something they want - nothing less than the name of God. Some sort of shadowy business people are also after him. But who knows what is really happening? You see, Max is not right in the head . . .
Writer-director Aronofsky clearly has a thing for this type of story, since it is pretty similar to "The Black Swan", another of his films. That is more technically accomplished, but I prefer this one.