Usually on Saturday night my partner and I build a pillow fortress on the living room carpet and watch a movie together. This time was no different and after spending considerable time scrolling through all our options we landed on Requiem for a Dream. We had both never seen it, but heard lots about it. And let me tell you: what a movie!
I think the best way to describe it is a combination of one of the weirdest/most intense movies I ever saw, but it was really good!
The movie
The movie is from 2000, but based on a book from 1978 by Hubert Selby Jr. The movie shows different types of addiction and the people that get caught up in it. As the movie and their drug use progresses over time, they end up more and more in the drug induced dream world, only to come crashing down in reality.
The main characters are Sara and Harry Goldfarb, mother and sun. Harry (played by Jered Leto) uses heroin with his best friend and girlfriend and spend their days trying to find ways to finance their drug abuse.
Sara, Harry's mother, is a woman who spends her days alone in front of the television after the death of her husband, Harry's father. When she gets selected to appear on one of the TV shows she watches, she feels motivated to lose some weight to appear on TV in her favorite red dress. A doctor prescribes her amphetamines to lose the weight, which helps but also mean she ends up with an addiction and is quickly losing her grip on reality.
The role of Sara is played incredibly well, earning Ellen Burstyn, the actress a nomination for an academy award. The paranoia she experiences really becomes clear to the viewer.
Cinematography
However, the real highlight of the movie is the way it was filmed. The director has decided to use something called "Hip-Hop Montage" meaning the movie has about two times as many cuts as an average movie. The result is a rapid succession of cuts with music, these cuts are so short that the viewer only has the time to recognize what they see (a lighter, some drugs etc) before the next image in shown. This means the audience doesn't have time to digest the images, feeling what it is like to be a drug user.
I thought this movie was incredibly made by director Darren Aronofsky and would really recommend it. The theme of the movie might be intense, but it really sucks you in and spits you out at the end of the movie. A true masterpiece