The Fountain and 4 Other Best Darren Aronofsky Movies if You Need to Challenge Your Mind
Prepare your watchlists, movie buffs.
Darren Aronofsky is one of the most ambitious directors of our time, a New York avant-garde artist who skillfully packages his extraordinary ideas in a shell of mainstream entertainment. We recalled his most outstanding films.
1. Pi, 1998
Even in his debut film, Aronofsky refused to settle for the status of a modest indie director.
His Pi opened up large-scale religious and philosophical themes, equating the problems of genius and its madness, as well as questions of knowing the world and God as a universal mathematical number.
The story of the madness of the gifted mathematician Max is told in the epileptic atmosphere of a thriller: with delusional editing, a powerful techno beat and a theological background.
2. The Wrestler, 2008
The sports drama about a once-successful wrestler going through a serious crisis revealed a different Aronofsky to the world – not only a metaphysician and fan of large-scale films, but also a subtle psychologist.
The Wrestler brought Mickey Rourke back into action – the role of a frustrated wrestling star not only turned out to be in line with the artist himself, but also became a dramatic highlight of his career.
At the same time, Aronofsky reworked the general motif of his work in a new genre – the story of human obsession, which takes place not only in the dusty apartments of mathematicians, but also in the ring.
3. Black Swan, 2010
The story of the rivalry of ballerinas is told with a painful sigh – with the subsequent schizophrenia of Natalie Portman's character, the motives of doppelgangers and the setting of a dizzying horror.
Black Swan charms with its professional montage, in which Aronofsky has taken the best from proven idols, from Verhoeven to Polanski, and carefully thought out and rehearsed his movie like a ballet number.
Black Swan is rightly considered the crowning achievement of Aronofsky's career, as he has found the most suitable form of entertainment for his avant-garde ideas, which have not disappeared since his debut.
4. The Fountain, 2006
The search for sacred knowledge and the source of eternal life is one of Aronofsky's fundamental creative themes. This project cost Aronofsky precious energy and took him four years to complete.
The Fountain is one of those rare occasions when the director puts the paranoid rhythm and madness of his thrillers on the back burner and offers the viewer a metaphysical experience of living eternity.
For such bold generalizations, Aronofsky paid a price – at least in the fact that The Fountain is not often remembered among his best films.
5. Mother!, 2017
Mother! is Aronofsky's most radical cinematic experiment. The story of a couple whose life turns into an apocalyptic bacchanalia, it has been called one of the author's strangest and most coded cinematic frescoes.
Mixing a claustrophobic thriller with biblical mythology, Aronofsky fills the screen with malice and selfishness – it is no coincidence that he places the life of the writer and his wife at the center of the story, whose family home gradually turns into a ball of unbridled grotesquerie.
Despite its pompous symbolism, Mother! seems like a sincere authorial confession about the relationship between the artist and the public.