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A lot of the time, what truly defines a horror movie isn’t so much the scary monsters or the bloody killing that appears on screen, but the atmosphere of dread and paranoia that it creates for the atmosphere. It’s why I placed The Trial on my first ever Halloween list because I found that film truly unsettling; that feeling of stifling inevitability, that everyone is purposely keeping things from you and you have no agency, I found it incredibly uncomfortable. It’s why The Thing is one of the greatest horror films of all time, because it plays upon that inherent fear we all have of not truly knowing someone, at least not as we know ourselves. At a certain point you’ll get over seeing Dracula or Jason Vorhees, but when you bring up things that people didn’t even know they were afraid of, that’s when you’ve got something truly scary on your hands. That’s when you’ve got real fear.
It is that feeling of paranoia that Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) tries to engender in his 1998 debut feature film, Pi. In it Sean Gullette plays Max Cohen, a secretive mathematician and computer programmer who lives by himself in an small New York apartment. It is Max’s belief and life’s work that mathematics is the language of the world, and that by discovering the patterns through which the numbers express themselves, one could know about the universe. Hidden within the infinite numbers of pi could even be a way to predict the rises and falls of the stock market, to manipulate the growth and decay of entire nations. Perhaps there’s even a way in there to talk with God.
The promises of wealth and knowledge of the universe tempt Max Cohen, and so he delves into the study of pi. It soon becomes clear, however, that the world around him seems to be changing. Suddenly, he’s starting to see the Golden Ratio in everything around him. People around him seem to be strange, even malevolent. Hallucinations. Blackouts. Migraines, brought about by staring into the sun as a child , have become cripplingly painful and seemingly incurable. Is Max ascending into some holy plain through mathematics, or is he descending into some kind of schizophrenic illusory world of conspiracies through years of isolation and drug abuse? The film, as you might expect, allows you to draw your own conclusions about that.
In terms of tone, there are several films that I’m reminded of. La Jetee, the film that inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, The Trial, Eraserhead, and in particular last year’s entry Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Although Pi isn’t nearly as insane as Tetsuo, both films have this sort of manic energy about them. Like some sort of punk reaction to French New Wave, shots are often either claustrophobic or extremely frenetic, moving from subject to subject as if to replicate Max’s own erratic mindset, and you rarely have a chance to sit and stew on things before something else pops off. Both films also feature a protagonist who is tormented by forces beyond his power, although this is expressed in different ways. In Tetsuo, the protagonist is being punished by the sins of his past, while Max (in true mad scientist fashion) is the architect of his misfortune through his reckless pursuit of pi. The film makes it fairly clear that Max is an Icarus, his arrogance dooming him from ever reaching the heavens that he grasps towards, which I suppose would make him a tragic figure if he wasn’t a paranoid nutjob trying to manipulate Wall Street. It is French New Wave though, being an asshole is expected.
The only glaring problem I can think of is the score, which is some kind of Hi-NRG Prodigy house stuff that works great when Max is in some crazy chase but not really when he’s just sitting at the computer. Otherwise it’s a entertaining, surrealistic thriller, a nice choice to pair with The Matrix this Halloween perhaps, and an interesting glimpse at the humble beginnings of one of modern Hollywood’s premier auteur directors. It didn’t quite tap into those paranoid fear centers like The Trial or The Thing personally, but then I’ve never been that good at math.
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