Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on September 29, 2000, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It happens on occasion that a filmmaker will take horror-genre material and approach it as something other, but not so common to see a movie that applies horror’s trappings to straight dramatic material. Such is the case with Requiem for a Dream, director Darren Aronofsky’s absolutely nerve-wracking follow-up to his indie hit Pi.
Aronofsky has described the movie, which he scripted from Hubert Selby Jr.’s book, as “a horror film in which addiction is the monster,” and is it ever. His lead characters are best friends Harry (Jared Leto) and Tyrone (Marlon Wayans), Harry’s mother Sara (Ellen Burstyn) and his girlfriend Marion (Jennifer Connelly). All four are looking for Something Better: Harry and Tyrone, casual drug users, hope to make a big financial score on a heroin deal that will allow them to live the (figurative) high life on the cash, while Sara, who lives alone with only a TV for company, yearns to appear on her favorite game show and begins a campaign of diet pills in preparation. Even before things go wrong—and they go very, very wrong—Aronofsky keeps us on edge with his edgy, subjective, sometimes hallucinatory style, which plunges into his characters’ increasingly delusionary mindset.
But this is no mere exercise in empty style; Aronofsky means for you to feel for these characters, and feel you do, thanks to exemplary work from the cast. Leto and Connelly create a moving pair of doomed lovers, while Wayans transforms what could have been just a humorous variation on his Scary Movie stoner into a three-dimensional character. Best of all is Burstyn, whose Sara begins as a slightly addled and lonely old soul, then slowly but surely descends into a personal hell as bad as anything she witnessed Linda Blair going through in The Exorcist.
The last half hour or so of Requiem for a Dream is as harrowing, riveting and upsetting as anything seen on screens in the last several years. Aronofsky pulls no punches as Harry and Tyrone find drugs literally taking over their lives, Marion becomes caught up in a psychosexual nightmare and Sara becomes institutionalized and worse. The director combines fast cuts, pixilation, disorienting lighting tricks, digital FX and some wincingly realistic special makeup by Vincent Guastini to thrust his characters—and the viewer—into a relentless downward spiral. Just when his protagonists, and we, think it can’t get worse, it does. And it’s clear early on that a happy ending may well not be in the cards here.
It may be too much for some viewers to take, but no one ever said addiction is pretty. And Aronofsky earns every right to his excesses by making sure audiences feel the loss of humanity instead of treating them like spectators at a freak show. Requiem for a Dream may not be horror in terms of subject matter, but it may well be the scariest experience you’ll have in a movie theater this year.
