Intriguing and Hypnotic Cult Movie

Rating: 8/10 (10 March 2006)

The mathematician Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) is tormented by a severe migraine since he was a kid, and he uses many pills to reduce his painful headaches. He is a lonely man, and his only friend is his former professor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis). Max has the following assumptions, which rules his life: (1) Mathematics is the language of nature; (2) Everything around us can be represented and understood from numbers; (3) If you graph the numbers in any systems, patterns emerge. Therefore there are patterns everywhere in nature. Based on these principles, Max is trying to figure out a system to predict the behavior of the stock market. Due to his research, Max is chased by a Wall Street company with obvious interest in the results of his studies, and by an orthodox Jew follower of the Torah, who believes that this long string of numbers is a code sent from God.
"Pi" is an intriguing and hypnotic cult movie, with an original story, great music score, fantastic black and white cinematography and bizarre atmosphere that in some moments recalls "Brazil". It is amazing it effects on me, maybe because of my formation in engineering and economics science, but I really like this movie a lot. The first time I saw this movie, on 17 August 2002, I was really impressed with the originality of this tense story. Although being an excellent movie, "Pi" is recommended for very specific audiences. Unfortunately there are persons that do not like Mathematics and certainly will have difficulties again to like and understand this movie based on their childhood trauma. My vote is eight.
Title (Brazil): "Pi"