Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans

Director: Darren Aronofsky

Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky

Running time: 1 hr 42 mins

Genre: Drama



CRITIQUE:


There is not a more suitable title for a film as grim, as disheartening, as ultra-depressing as Requiem for a Dream. When many films of the escapist order allows us to close our eyes and feast on the power of imagination, this one wrenches our eyes open to the cold shock of reality, as the title aptly suggests, the end of a dream. It literally, and unrepentantly, explores the abyss of drug addiction in the point of view of four related characters, a quartet of lives going through hellish mental, psychological ordeals. One thing is certain here, Darren Aronofsky’s uncompromising sophomore effort is not an easy film to stomach. Themes of decay, loneliness and the death of hope are projected through these characters, four Brooklyn residents whose seemingly ordinary day-to-day dalliances with drugs turn into a spectacle of human horror. A miserable retired widower desires for television fame and social acceptance through diet pills; two lovers embark on a recreational drug use; and a friend involves himself in drug-trafficking. These people are, in every sense of the compounded words, fucked-up. Rendered with fine performances all around, Leto, Connelly, and surprisingly Wayans, all give their sheer best, but it is really Ellen Burstyn’s astonishing performance here that stands out. Her Sarah is a truly haunting figure, whose transformation from a mere old widow to a shell-shocked, semi-corpse will not leave your mind for weeks.


Just when drug movie clichés threaten to appear, where cinema verité is pretty much the employer of grittiness, Aronofsky heightens his cinematic techniques – razor-sharp editing entails rapid succession of images, the dilating of pupils and molecular photography – it’s a cinematic language that effectively condenses (and disperses) time and space, comparable to the effects of drugs. And when things become too fast, he allows a breathing space in the form of hallucinatory sequences, characters envisioning postcard-picture scenes through windows. But these are all transitory. It’s a brutal reminder of these characters’ ill-fated future. If you last all the way through its gripping cross-cutting finale, a merciless depiction of hellhole on Earth, you’d desperately want for some comic relief.


VERDICT:

A gut-wrenching descent into human darkness as we witness a quartet of characters’ downward spiral into drug hell. Aronofsky’s treatise on drug addiction is a masterclass on the use of editing, sound and visual onslaught. It’s also a harrowing nightmare to brave through.



RATING: A