Where to begin with Darren Aronofsky

Darren Aronofsky once described the experience of movie-watching as akin to that of going to an amusement park, a fitting analogy for a director whose films frequently conjure the stomach lurch sensation of a rollercoaster drop. Such is their unrelentingly bleak and harrowing nature. Aronofsky’s cinema is one of fixation to the point of self-destruction, in which his protagonists’ obsessions both propel and poison them. He specialises in portraits of people losing control of their life and their grip on reality, putting us into his characters’ heads with indelible images that he sears into ours.

A student of film and social anthropology at Harvard University, Aronofsky went on to study directing at the AFI Conservatory. With Akira Kurosawa, Federico Fellini, Roman Polanski, Terry Gilliam and Shinya Tsukamoto among his influences, his output is equally varied, spanning psychological thrillers, sci-fi romances and sports dramas. But his preoccupations remain constant – as do the adjectives ‘disturbing’ and ‘divisive’ used to describe his work.

His movies can often feel like sensory overload, spiking anxiety through prolonged tension, or sustaining despair through their depictions of characters trapped in loops – a mathematician’s set routine in Pi (1998), a lonely widow’s scheduled pill popping in Requiem for a Dream (2000). They span from the intimate, in which handheld cameras evoke claustrophobia, to the epic, using fluid dynamics to craft a sense of infinity. For all his visual bombast, however, he knows the most stirring sight is that of the human face, in close-up, struck by emotion.

The easiest entry point into Aronofsky’s world of minds under strain and bodies pushed to the limit is The Wrestler (2008), in which ageing has-been Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson (Mickey Rourke) wrangles himself back into the pro circuit, chasing the glory days despite his health being unable to keep up. “They say wrestling’s fake,” says exotic dancer Cassidy (Marisa Tomei). It is, but the scars are real. Skin is sliced into, stitched and stapled as Aronofsky hones in on gnarly battle wounds, then flashes back to what caused them, rendering them real despite the sport’s staginess. 

Rourke, nominated for the Best Actor Oscar that year, turns his body into a battering ram, conveying years of wear and tear through his laboured breathing and pained gait. Inside the ring, there’s adoration and applause. Outside, he’s a disappointment. 

Aronofsky makes movies about people who suffer for their art, but in The Wrestler, suffering is the art, the spectacle that people are so drawn to. The film is a distillation of his most enduring themes – loneliness as inextricable from singleminded obsession, the endurance and fragility of the human body – while foregoing his more disorienting visual tricks. Instead, the 16mm film and handheld camera give The Wrestler a gritty realism, a striking contrast for a film about performance. 

Aronofsky trades piledrivers for pirouettes with Black Swan (2010), a companion piece to The Wrestler that evokes the punishing toll of performance art regimens, but swan-dives full tilt into psychological and body horror this time around. Doubles, mirror images and unnerving doppelgängers dot this tale of a repressed, rigid ballerina (Natalie Portman), whose artistic director pushes her to lose herself in her art during a production of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Instead, she loses her head.

An even more visceral depiction of deteriorating mental and physical states unfolds in Requiem for a Dream, a grim psychological drama about four characters (played by Ellen Burstyn, Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, Marlon Wayans) in the grip of drug addiction. Split screens, fisheye lenses and SnorriCam shots, in which the cameras are rigged to the actors’ bodies, all convey a heady distortion that speaks to the characters’ increasing desperation and tragic delusion. Ghostly dissolves capture them turning into mere echoes of themselves. Adapting Hubert Selby Jr’s 1978 novel of the same name, Aronofsky speeds up time and draws it out agonisingly, evoking the rush of the high and then its crushing absence.

More temporal trickery occurs in The Fountain (2006), in which Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz pull triple-role duty in a film spanning three interwoven narratives across different timelines. If not logical, it all makes thematic sense – coping with grief, after all, isn’t a linear process. Spanning 1,000 years, this is the story of a man who just needs more time. His wife is dying, he grows frantic to find a cure. The limitations of the body, its susceptibility to disease and death, have never been more keenly felt in Aronofsky’s works.

The obsessive search for an answer is also found in the director’s first feature, shot on a shoestring budget of donations from friends and relatives. Pi’s paranoid number theorist (Sean Gullette) hunts for a ‘key number’ that will unlock patterns, order and predictable outcomes, all while being helpless against the conjured horrors of his own fracturing mind. A spinning camera captures how unmoored he is, black-and-white photography reflects the rigid absolutes in which he views the world and high-contrast shadows blur, warp and threaten to swallow him whole. At just 84 minutes long, Pi feels relentless, packed with the oppressive atmosphere, ambitious ideas and nightmarish imagery that would come to define the filmmaker’s later works. 

All of Aronofsky’s films, in some way or other, touch upon faith, its vast mysteries and varied interpretations but only two draw as heavily on the Bible as Noah (2014) and Mother! (2017). Neither are for Biblical purists (six-armed rock monsters don’t exactly scream ‘faithful to the source material’). With Noah, Aronofsky stretches a four-chapter story into a feature that’s a disaster epic but also a family drama, CGI spectacle, action extravaganza, claustrophobic psychological horror and a character study. An uneven and unwieldy meditation on morality and free will, it’s anchored by the gravitas of Russell Crowe, embodying the loneliness of pleading to a god who won’t answer and how the desperation to read into this silence could drive one to madness. 

Mother! is more allegorical, smuggling Old and New Testament references into a home invasion movie, suffusing its atmosphere with unrelenting anxiety as one woman’s (Jennifer Lawrence) sanctuary turns suffocating. Like most Aronofsky movies, it puts its protagonist through the wringer, this time seriously stretching the limits of abuse and torment that one hapless person – and the horrified audience watching her – can endure. 

The Whale (2022) is a renewed examination of his pet concerns – the perceived comforts and endured cruelties of religion, a human body under strain – but, confined to a single location, it often feels inert. Based on a play, its reams of dialogue assume the form of repetitive conversations and it lacks the potent imagery of his earlier works. Aronofsky puts his 600-pound protagonist’s guilt and shame on display as much as his body, with the film unable to reconcile the sympathy it attempts to generate for this man with its tendency to gawk at his form. 

One of his more controversial films, it sparked accusations of fatphobia, not least for putting lead Brendan Fraser in a fatsuit. A testament to Aronofsky’s ability to elicit indelible performances from his cast, however, it’s only fitting that playing a dying man would spark a resurrection of Fraser’s career, giving him his first leading role in nearly a decade and securing him the Best Actor Oscar that year.

Caught Stealing is in cinemas from 29 August 2025.