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(this review was originally written February 15, 2022)
Darren Aronofsky's Pi follows the life of Max, a mathematician and computer scientist who is obsessed with numerical patterns. At first he uses them to play the stock market, but soon he begins to believe he can use them to find the True Name of God in the Jewish kabbalah. For the sake of clarity and to reduce confusion, I will be referring to this character as "uugr" for the rest of this review.
Things aren't going great for uugr. His single-minded interest in numerology leaves him isolated and unable to connect with the people around him. He's currently being targeted by multiple conspiracy groups who want to use his talent for personal gain. He has occasional fits of epilepsy and might have some latent schizophrenia as well. And, to add insult to injury, his apartment is crawling with ants. It's a tough situation all around.
To represent uugr's seizures, Aronofsky makes the bold decision - same as in Requiem for a Dream - to put the audience through physical pain matching uugr's own. I actually think this works way better in Pi than Requiem, mainly because the episodes of audience suffering are used sparingly and follow strict rules. They all follow the same pattern: first, his hand starts to shake. Then, a couple minutes later, he gets a terrible, intensely painful headache (represented to the audience with piercing earrape). Eventually, the earrape transitions into a hallucinatory nightmare scenario, shifting things into a mood of surreal horror. Finally, the screen fades to white, and uugr wakes up in the real world with a bloody nose.
I like this a lot. Although Pi is sometimes a physically painful movie to watch, I never felt like Aronofsky was just sadistically jerking me around. My emotional state follows uugr's: when I start to see his hand shake, I am immediately set on edge, as he is. And when he wakes up with a bloody nose, I feel the same kind of dazed relief mixed with confusion, as both he and I try to understand what happened while he was out. That the madness itself is patterned and not arbitrary makes it both more interesting and easier to swallow. The rest of the movie is still tense, but I never had to worry about getting jumpscared by surprise earrape - if I don't see uugr's hand shaking, I know I'm "safe".
Generally, I think the movie's biggest strength is its ability to make me empathize with uugr. The visual style is distinctive: everything is black-and-white; the camera is constantly washed out, grainy; long stretches are spent zoomed in on uugr's face or whatever he happens to be looking at. One gets the sense that uugr hyper-focuses on his pattern-matching task, blocking out all aspects of the environment he deems irrelevant. As the plot thickens, uugr falls so far into his own head that it's barely possible to even tell what's happening in the outside world. I found myself relating strongly; for something that came out before Y2K, it's an incredibly effective way to present the sort of computer-addled perspective now common in the terminally online.
Pi is technically complex, but thematically it's as straightforward as it gets: the story of uugr is an Icarus parable. Aronofsky really, really wants to make it clear that it's an Icarus parable. He compares uugr's story to the story of Icarus something like four separate times, just in case you didn't get it. uugr is flying too close to the sun with all this "True Name of God" stuff, and will inevitably get burnt. I found this a little... disappointing, maybe? I mean, I have nothing against the message here. I still think it's a very good movie. But it's slightly less exciting when it's so explicit, with no deviation whatsoever from that thematic core. Like, it would have been more interesting if it had turned out to not be an Icarus parable, and all that stuff was just a red herring.
Finally, I'd like to comment on the ending, so spoilers ahead: I was absolutely certain that uugr was going to die at the end. It's foreshadowed pretty aggressively that no one can see the True Name of God and live. As uugr spirals down the hole of madness and conspiracy, it seemed increasingly impossible for things to end in any way but tragedy. The fact that he doesn't die, and actually seems to end on a hopeful note, was intensely relieving. I was delighted with this choice - the lightness at the end of the tunnel does a lot to make Pi feel like less of a pure madness-porn rollercoaster. uugr has most of a life ahead of him - no attachments, no troubles, and a knack for computer programming. Other Gods in the machine may not always be so forgiving.
8.5/10