Pi

Darren Aronofsky’s magisterial monochrome mystery concerns a mathematician whose discovery of a powerful number leads to the dark side.

Maximillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a secluded New York mathematician who is fixated with the beauty of numbers. He’s so obsessed that he has built a supercomputer he calls Euclid.

When the computer displays a strange, 216-digit number, Max believes it useless until it accurately predicts a major factor of stock market activity. Max hastily searches for the number while the computer becomes known to a Wall Street firm and an arcane Hasidic group, in this dark psychological thriller. As daring and dynamic as a directorial debut can be, Pi announced the arrival of a true cinematic voice in the form of Darren Aronofsky. Although he has gone on to make bigger films like Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan, Pi was the origin of his unique, dark, and psychodynamic sensibility. It’s a puzzle of a film, and art house audiences in 1998 could not deny the escalating artistic vision behind the camera.