Movie Review: Pi

8/10

I wish I could have used the symbol for Pi, but on my system it's coming out as a squared off n

My apologies.

Right at the other end of the scale from "Kate And Leopold"'s high concept, genre defined approach to fimmaking we have sundance darling and Fountain making screwball film director Darren Aronofsky's Pi - a film about obsession with numbers. This is at least a hundred times better than the Jim Carrey dud "The Number 23", which clearly attempted to tread at least some of the same ground of bizarre numerical obsession.

Pi is a much more focussed and brave piece of film than that celluloid dust mote, and is the story of Max Cohen, a migraine suffering maths genius who is obsessed with finding a predictable pattern in the New York stock exchange (would be quite useful right now, really) and meets two strange factions who want to use his skills for their own ends.

As he gets deeper into his obsession the lines between paranoia and reality blur, and we share his POV as he goes off the deep end.

It's a small, ultra low budget piece and is shot in ultra low-fi black and white, centred entirely around a magnificent central performance from Sean Gulette as Max - he manages to survive the hideous task of depicting such a complex and lonely character and carrying the entire movie (which would make or break everyone's careers) on his shoulders.

It's also one of the few movies that believably depicts hallucination and dreams (for me, anyway) and these are suitably frightening and discomforting. It's Lynchian without his wilful obfuscation, it's artistic without being pretentious. It's like watching the director try and balance on the fences between these extremes and for the most part he succeeds.

It is a marvellously twisty, eccentric movie and I would recommend it to anyone who likes a bit of variety, and needs a break from the many genre movies we watch 95% of the time. It's not long, and it's not simple, but I highly recommend it.

A