Like It or Not, a Film That's Impossible to Get Out of Your Head

Rating: 8/10 (14 July 2010)

I can easily see how two different people could have two completely different experiences watching Darren Aronofsky's "Requiem for a Dream." On the one hand, it wouldn't be difficult to dismiss the film as an over-the-top mess. But on the other hand, it's such a confident mess that it would be as easy to label it a nightmarish masterpiece.
I tend to fall somewhere in the middle, leaning a bit more toward the latter. There are problems galore to find with the film if you go digging, but it deeply disturbed and affected me nonetheless.
The film introduces us to a handful of characters all deeply dependent on drugs of one kind or another, and then follows them all down a demented rabbit hole as their stories spiral out of control. The final 20 minutes or so are a harrowing montage of terrible things happening to all of them -- infected arms being amputated, girls performing sex shows for drug money, middle aged women ending up in psych wards receiving shock therapy -- and threaten to take the film too far into camp territory to recover. But the saving grace of the film is that it's meant as more of an impressionistic soliloquy on desperation and hopelessness rather than a realistic representation of drug abuse.
Whatever else it is, it's a film that's virtually impossible to get out of your head.
Grade: A