Reel Look: Pi

Rating: 7/10 (14 March 2015)

"When I was a little kid, my mother told me not to stare into the sun, so when I was six I did..." So repeats this line from our main protagonist and unreliable narrator throughout 'Pi', Darren Aronofsky's surreal psychological indie thriller and explosive directorial debut. But was newcomer Aronofsky able to tell story enough that could accurately and shockingly be told on a shoestring budget? Let's take a look.
Shot in high-contrast black and white, we are thus plunged into the disturbed mind, madness and mechanisms of mathematics computer genius and number theorist Maximillian "Max" Cohen (Sean Gullette), of whom suffers cluster headaches, extreme paranoia, hallucinations and social anxiety disorder. Unemployed and holed up in a dreary Chinatown apartment in New York City, Max makes a breakthrough when his computer Euclid crashes as he makes stock predictions, the machine spitting out a seemingly random 216-digit number. Eventually discovering that what Euclid spat out was accurate, Max slowly descends from curiosity to obsession, confronting his old mathematics mentor Sol Robeson (Mark Margolis) to encountering Lenny Meyer, (Ben Shenkman) a Hasidic Jew in a coffee shop who coincidentally does mathematical research on the Torah. He even explains to Max that some people believe that the Torah is a string of numbers that form a code sent by God. From Wall Street agents to members of a radical Jewish Kabbalah sect, Max is thus thrown into even more turmoil as he realizes the pattern of the numbers as he writes them out on the brink of an epiphany as to why these people want them for their own extreme purposes. With the urgent monochromatic photography of Matthew Libatique,everything that follows seems to fade from the fuzzy uncertainty being the fine line of science-fiction into the maddening realm of the entropic unknown as Max sees it, thanks to the brilliant choice of the SnorriCam that provides the film with its unsettling, queasy edge on how he views the world around him slipping off into oblivion. Coffee and cream dance in a cup, waves crash, ants creep and crawl about. Patterns are everywhere, according to the Fibonacci sequence. Unlike it's own design, Max taps too far in to the very genius of his own subconscious and finds himself slowly spiraling out of his very own control. With the similarities of a Lynchian thriller such as 'Eraserhead' and Orson Welles' 'The Trial', 'Pi' is a paranoid pulse-pounding psych trip, racing along to Oren Sarch's rapid editing and Clint Mansell's cyberpunk score while maintaining to match the claustrophobic life of Max in turn. Remarkably gripping and frighteningly intelligent as well as constructed, 'Pi' proved maverick auteur director Aronofsky a promising career in films that would later probe our psychosis and thrill our senses beyond compare with some quite disturbing and otherworldly sights. Happy Pi Day!