Pi makes mathematical obsession tense, grubby and unexpectedly lonely. We recommend its grainy images and abrasive music to anyone with a taste for paranoid thrillers, though Aronofsky’s relentless pressure leaves his ideas underexamined.
Darren Aronofsky’s Pi is a good paranoid thriller with a wearing habit of treating every thought as an emergency. Sean Gullette plays Maximillian Cohen, a mathematician searching for patterns that might explain far more than the stock market. Numbers, Jewish mysticism and the possibility of a universal explanation feed his obsession. Aronofsky keeps us close enough to share the strain, which is where the film succeeds. The emphasis stays on what the search is doing to him.
Gullette makes Cohen’s certainty uncomfortable to watch, while preserving something of the loneliness underneath it. We believe he would let ordinary company slip away for the chance to prove himself right. Even when his reasoning becomes difficult to follow, that need remains understandable. Gullette does not ask us to find him agreeable, and the performance is better for it. Aronofsky presses the signs of psychological distress so hard, however, that we soon have little room to wonder about him.
Matthew Libatique’s high-contrast black-and-white photography makes the strain visible: bright areas glare and dark ones swallow detail. The grain and shifting light make it difficult to look comfortably at an image, however carefully it has been composed. Matthew Maraffi’s production design helps make the urban surroundings feel cramped and unwelcoming, so the sense of confinement continues beyond Gullette’s performance. This is effective work, giving a largely cerebral pursuit somewhere unpleasant to happen. The images keep bringing us back to the discomfort of occupying Cohen’s point of view.
We felt hemmed in by the grainy images and the pounding music. Clint Mansell’s score makes concentration feel physically exhausting, and its aggression is well suited to a man who cannot leave a thought alone. Oren Sarch’s editing keeps the pressure up, allowing the agitation to carry across the film without much breathing space. The combination works, though we began to want more variation in the pace. Sustaining alarm for this long can make distinct moments of distress start to feel much the same.
The larger weakness lies in Aronofsky’s screenplay, which brings mathematics, stock-market speculation and Jewish mysticism together without making those connections equally persuasive. The prospect of finding a pattern beneath everything is enough to get a thriller moving. Once that prospect has been established, the writing too often returns to evidence that Cohen is unwell. We understand his compulsion, but we would like more opportunity to consider what fascinates him. The film’s confidence can become trying when it expects the intensity of a belief to make that belief interesting.
As a paranoid thriller, Pi earns our recommendation by making a single person’s fixation so uncomfortable to share. The 84-minute running time helps, keeping a narrow, punishing experience from stretching beyond what it can sustain. There is enough vulnerability in Gullette’s performance to make the human damage matter, even when the theories cease to persuade. Save it for an evening when quiet is not a requirement.
