PI

Max (Sean Gullette) is a loner who lives in a dank apartment block, his unique talent for numbers largely ignored by all save for the young girl who lives across the landing with her mother. She likes to collar Max and have him provide the answer to impossible mathematical calculations on the spot. Each time she checks the results on her calculator, he's spot on.

In his sporadic diary-type narration, Max informs us that he stared into the sun when he was six simply to spite his mother, who'd instructed him not to. He accredits this as being the point in his life when he became a maths genius.

We learn from his regular meetings with his former tutor-turned-stroke victim Sol (Mark Margolis) that Max got his PHD in maths at age 20. Since then, he's been working obsessively towards discovering a numeric code that will crack the stock market. "Mathematics is the language of nature", his voiceover persuades, "everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers".

Despite Sol's frequent warnings that his protégé needs to take a break before he winds up like him (his condition being a direct result of a similar obsession), Max continues to strive tirelessly towards his goal. But the cracks appear quickly - he's consumed by paranoia from the offset. This extends to him fleeing from Wall Street types trying to buy his talents, visibly shaking when subjected to public intercourse with strangers (something he tries to control with medication) and even attacking a student who quite innocently takes a photograph of him while on a train.

When the mysterious Lenny (Ben Shenkman) keeps bumping into Max publicly and slowly graduates from informal name exchanges to numerical-based discussions, even the viewer starts to suspect something is amiss.

Lenny's true motivations only come to light when Max's computer crashes and he accidentally discards of a piece of paper which he later discovers contains a 216-digit number which may be ... well, that would be telling.

But basically, everyone wants a piece of what's inside Max's head. Even he does, despite the fact that it's giving him weird Cronenbergian visions and a strange growth has appeared on the side of his head...

Science versus religion. Both fare rather brutally in Darren Aronofsky's audacious lo-fi directorial debut. Filmed in stark, haunting monochrome on a paltry budget, it's testament to the movie's ambition and originality that it's emerged as one of the key American films of the 1990s. It also heralded the arrival of a major director, who has gone on to win acclaim and awards while reinventing sports films (THE WRESTLER), stylising addiction in harrowing style (REQUIEM FOR A DREAM) and making ballet a tad less boring (BLACK SWAN).

With PI, the simple genius of it is that it tells a supposedly tedious tale - that of a mathematician trying to recover a digit of seemingly unfathomable importance - as a thriller, while dressing it up in black-and-white arthouse delivery. The result is something weird, a mix of David Lynch and the aforementioned David Cronenberg, with a definite large dose of Shinya Tsukamoto's TETSUO: THE IRON MAN thrown in for good measure.

Gullette is convincing as the increasingly fraught protagonist; Margoli is god as ever: has this man ever been anything less than dependable? No-one else really counts, to be honest - other than Aronofsky and his tight editing, and Matthew Libatique's equal parts abrasive/beautiful cinematography.

PI is a film that I resisted at the time of its initial release, as I believed it would be a pretentious muddle of "meaningful" dialogue and shoe gazing indie leanings. You could certainly read the former into it, but that hardly matters as this is vital, fast-paced and convincingly suspicious melodrama. When the drill finally comes out (watch it if you need to know what that means) and the young girl Jenny subsequently confirms the success of Max's latest efforts, you can't help but rejoice in his hollow victory.

Lionsgate's blu-ray marks the 15th Anniversary of Aronofsky's audacious debut.

It presents the film uncut in a 16x9 widescreen presentation which preserves the director's preferred 1.66:1 aspect ratio. It looks correctly framed and, considering that this was shot on 16mm and then later blown up to 35mm for cinema screenings, looks very good.

Yes, some scenes exhibit an ample amount of grain, while others do look somewhat blown out. But it's all accurate as to how this $60,000.00 film (part-funded by members of the director's family) was shot. If it looked pristine, that would be a false representation of what Aronofsky achieved.

Blacks are solid, contrast is strong, ghosting and image enhancement are non-existent: prepare yourself for a nicely filmic presentation, warts and all.

English 2.0 stereo comes in a nice Master HD mix which provides clean and clear playback throughout. Optional English subtitles are well-written and, for most part, easily readable.

The animated main menu page looks more like the opening titles to FIGHT CLUB than PI. From there, a pop-up scene-selection menu allows access to the film via 12 chapters.

Extras commence with two audio commentary tracks. The first is a fairly academic but fluent and fact-filled offering from the director. The second, from Gullette, is a little more easy-going but no less fascinating.

Four minutes of deleted scenes don't add much but do come with the benefit of further commentary from Aronofsky.

An 8-minute montage of behind-the-scenes footage looks to have been shot on video, and is presented in pillar-boxed fashion. It's amiable fly-on-the-wall fluff complemented by narration from Aronofsky and Gullette.

A music video for the lead techno tune (think: the 'funky drummer' loop that was so overused at the time, set to a typical early Prodigy-type instrumental) clocks in at just under 3 minutes in length. It mixes footage from the film with colour stock reels of insects under microscopic cameras and so on.

The film's theatrical trailer is 90 second long; the film's "original trailer" is 75 seconds long. They're entirely different, but both manage to convey the film's fusing of arthouse oddness and genre-pleasing entertainment across.

I'd have liked a retrospective documentary but I suppose that's too much to ask.

Still, what we get is good and the film holds up well as an unconventional thriller capable of tantalising the brain cells as much as raising the adrenaline. It may yet stand the test of time to be remembered as Aronofsky's best film.

Review by Stuart Willis