Pi

Darren Aronofsky's grainy, bleached-out black-and-white debut feature puts together many intriguing ideas, bathed in intense sequences of pain and hallucination; it's challenging but rewarding. Released in 1998 and written by the director (based on a story by himself, actor Sean Gullette, and producer Eric Watson), Pi is an almost impossibly brilliant combination of ideas that seem as if they can come only from real life. The movie sends you away pondering the infinite possibilities of patterns and mathematics and religion and nature, as well as the possibility of something greater than ourselves.

Yet Aronofsky takes a vividly downbeat view of these things, as if their very existence would certainly drive a person insane, rather than revealing anything. Pi has a penchant for torment and anguish that the director explores in virtually all of his later works (especially Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and mother!). The grimy cinematography offers nothing to grab on to in terms of texture or color; the screeching, terrifying headache sequences are worthy of a horror movie; and the main character's final solution is as pessimistic as they come -- though it has a somewhat peaceful conclusion. Nonetheless, Pi is an intensely personal work, uncompromising and unforgettable, that deservedly became an instant cult classic.