Pi (1998)

Rating: B-

Dir: Darren Aronofsky
Star: Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Samia Shoaib

Goddamit, as if pretentious titles like Se7en weren’t enough, here’s one that’s not part of the ASCII character set. Quibbles over nomenclature aside, this is creepy and effective stuff, though perhaps more as a portrait of mental illness than as anything more substantial. Sean Gullette plays a digit-obsessed nerd who stumbles across the numeric key to a secret code with implications far beyond the stock market predictions he was seeking. He’s also teetering on the edge, with hallucinations which become indistinguishable from his “reality”.

It all makes for uncomfortable viewing (assisted by a thumping hard score from former Pop Will Eat Itself grebo god Clint Mansell), and you’ll likely need to go through it more than once to get a handle on it. Aronofsky loses his way somewhat in the middle of the film when the tenuous grip it has on reality flies out the window altogether, but he manages to pull things back together in a disturbing final reel. After this, and the NC-17 rated Requiem for a Dream, it will certainly be interesting to see what he does with franchise Batman: Year One, which he’s been picked to do by Warner Bros. Joel Schumacher, he is not