31 out of 35 people found the following review helpful:

Furious Invention.

PaulP from London, 29th October, 2003

Darren Aronofsky has taken a defiantly unfilmable story and created something really quite startling. The film documents mathematician Max's struggle with both his sanity and the mysterious Pi, the enigmatic ratio of a circle's circumference to diameter. Max believes that Pi holds the key to discerning hidden structures in the universe and to this end he is pursued by a multinational finance company who hope his discovery will lead to complete mastery of the global stock market.

Reminiscent of early David Lynch (especially Eraserhead), Pi is shot in gloriously dense, grainy black and white. The light is uniformly harsh, throwing deep, chiascuro shadows and rendering liquids positively mercurial.
Despite it's surrealist leanings, the film is strongly characterised and plotted, with more than a nod toward film noir traditions. The cerebral script is wonderfully visualised and you are left appreciating just what you can do with a hand-held camera, an intelligent script and a lot of imagination.

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13 out of 15 people found the following review helpful:

Dark

J from Northampton, 15th October, 2005

Superb dark low budget movie. Very good use of imagery, and a brilliantly disjointed well thought out storyline. The grainy dark feel compliments the story perfectly. Also features a very enjoyable 'making of' documentary.

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11 out of 12 people found the following review helpful:

Intense

imran from , 14th October, 2004

Another intense piece of film making by Aronofsky, this film certainly bears similarities to the brilliant Requiem For A Dream with the sounds and visuals making it very uncomfortable to watch at times. The plot is undoubtedly fascinating as we follow our tortured hero's attempts to find mathematical patterns in the universe and the pursuit by outside forces looking to harness his genius for their own ends. Overall I really enjoyed it as you don't really see movies like this very often and while things are left unexplained and a bit vague you don't always find explanations in every film you see so you can let this one off.

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10 out of 14 people found the following review helpful:

Crazed and Beautiful

Troy Salter from England, 24th November, 2004

Having loved Requiem for a Dream by Arnofski, I decided to track down any other material by him. Stumbling across Pi I didn?t really know what to expect. I've seen this feature a few times now, and every time I find myself in a kind of daze. The look of the film is raw, artistic and beautiful. The story is superb and you'll find yourself thinking far too much about it's theories, yet for anyone who likes to think, and be philosophical - then Pi's for you.

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Genius?

Applie from from Edinburgh, 18th February, 2010

Pi's main character, Max, is a mathematician who believes patterns exist not only in nature, but society. He aims to prove this by finding a pattern in the stock market. It's impossible to talk about the film without mentioning the way it's shot. Told entirely from the lead's point of view: it's in black and white, uses strange camera angles, slow frame rates, and dream sequences with brains. All of this is designed to show us how the main character sees the world: distorted, intense but with an underlying order he can't quite grasp. The movie does a good job of showing the madness and obsession of genius: the protagonist can be viewed as either entirely delusional or as someone who is really close to grasping a reality no one else can see. However, as someone who knows a bit about maths, it annoyed me that the maths used was so broad and da-Vinci-code-like. As a consequence, the film failed to convince me of the protagonist's genius, and allowed me only to see his madness and obsession. It almost pains me to say that a much less ambitious film, A Beautiful Mind, did a better job of keeping this balance.

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Irritating nonsense!

stalingrad from , 12th January, 2010

Reminded me slightly of 1920's German expressionist films. Just an observation. However this was no Nosferatu! I found the thing rambling, confusing & unpleasant. I'm being generous with 1 star!

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So what?

A Customer from Witney, 14th November, 2009

Disappointing ado about very little. Contrived to appear more than it is.

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Year 1 film student stuff

A Customer from London, 19th October, 2009

This is a monotonous black and white, low-budget rubbish which should never have made it to DVD, let alone the big screen. Lots of screams and wailing and a mentally ill man obsessed by a 216-digit number throwing himself around a room, taking drugs, smashing things up and falling over (and again, and again, and again, and again etc.). And that's about it - a first year film student could do better.

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