Critically described as 'the greatest movie you’ll never want to see again', this intense psycho-drama of how drugs crush any shred of humanity in addicts is a bleak tragedy of errors. On first viewing, Darren Aronofsky’s REQUIEM FOR A DREAM (2000) was so powerfully grim, it was a week before I recovered from its lingering depressive mind-set. Hyper-charged editing patterns combine with surrealistic images and uncompromisingly morbid repetitions to create its unsettling moods. The provocative affect is mesmerising yet equally disturbing.
The furious barrage of hypnotic visuals sets RFAD far apart from any typical junkie pictures, like Terry Gilliam’s black-comedy Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas (1998), so its relentlessly downbeat model of cynical pessimism eventually becomes a mind-shattering experience, that’s also heart-breaking because an addict’s quest for yet another dose of high sometimes mirrors wishful thinking about freedom from inhuman cruelty in this modern world. Drug culture means no possibility of any fleeting escape from that all-consuming desire for a fix.
While Ellen Burstyn steals the show as widow Sara Goldfarb, hooked on diet pills and obsessed by trashy TV shows, her low-life son Harry (Jared Leto), and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly), fail as heroin dealers, very soon falling into crimes that spiral all the way down to scenes like hell on Earth. Some pictures are unforgettable. This is not usually classified as genre horror and yet that’s exactly what this scary, weird, and crushingly depressing drama really is.
What sticks in memory is genuine horrors without a pause, bloated with grisly shocks and intense suffering, evocative of social depravity for a devastating emotional landslide of startling images. Mental collapse and physical infection eventually results in hospitals or prison abuse, with paranoid hallucinations until... there’s no such thing in reality as a happy ending that exists beyond fantasy.
Stunning evidence of a visionary imagination this cements director Aronofsky’s reputation as a fascinating American auteur to watch, and so his later work, in particular, The Fountain (2006), Black Swan (2010), Noah (2014), and Mother! (2017), reveals a talent for conjuring up weird wonders to rival those by David Lynch.
