Review of Requiem for a Dream, directed by Darren Aronofsky

I’ve been running this blog for less than three years now, documenting my life as someone who travels a lot and loves a good book, movie, or television show. If you’re new here, welcome. I hope you enjoy this post enough to stay around for a while, as this website has become such a beautiful opportunity for me to build a community.

But my beginnings of taking film more seriously began my freshman year of college. I took a Korean cinema class and decided to minor in film and media studies, then when I realized I would love to be a film critic, I bamboozled my way into a Film Criticism class for film majors.

I also had to take the Intro to Film course with the freshmen film students, when I was a junior, but we watched a ton of movies during this time. In the arts sometimes the best way t learn about craft and technique is to just consume a lot of movies, read a lot of books, or go out and experience art in the world.

It was in these classes I learned the foundations of film criticism, which actually allowed me to become a film critic right out of college, and I also watched some core movies. Requiem for a Dream was one of the movies we needed to watch in the Introduction to Film course, and I never forgot about it.

I’ve always been writing little forms of blog posts even before I was writing a blog, simply because I love writing that much, so as I was thinking about the movie and revisiting it, I decided to post this blog about it.

Let’s get into the review! I know I can ramble a lot in these introductions, which can be boring if you came for the main review.

A look into how drug addiction completely and utterly messes up the lives of four different individuals.

In this movie, we focus on four different characters, but for the sake of my sanity, we’re going to go through them one at a time. We meet Sara first, a widow who lives in deep Brooklyn, somewhere in Brighton Beach, and she spends a lot of her time watching television. Her son is Harry, and he’s a heroin addict.

With his friend Tyrone, they deal out drugs in order to try and get enough money to follow their dreams. Not the best way to do it, but Harry wants to open a store with his girlfriend Marion, in order to sell her clothing designs, and Tyrone no longer wants to live in the ghetto and provide for his family.

Meanwhile back at home, Sara gets a call requesting her to appear on her favorite show that she tunes into every time it’s on television. She wants to wear a red dress she specifically wore at Harry’s graduation, but she needs to lose a lot of weight to fit into it. So she begins a crash diet, which is dangerous in itself.

When she goes to the doctor, she asks for amphetamines, which is the beginning of the end for her. She does lose weight on them and finds that she has more energy, but her son notices pretty quickly that his mother is showing signs of addiction. But when he confronts her about it, she mentions this is one of her only motivations to keep going.

However, she increases her dosage while waiting for the invitation to come onto the show, and then goes into psychosis. As that happens, Tyrone gets caught in-between dealers and the mafia in a shootout and is arrested just for being there. Harry spends their money in order to bail him out, and soon after they’re cut off from their heroin stocks.

Tyrone hears that a. huge shipment is coming from Florida, but the cost is high and the risks to get it are also pretty dangerous. Harry then asks his girlfriend to engage in prostitution, and she takes her own psychiatrist as a client. This is the beginning of the downfall for Marion, too.

Meanwhile, his mother starts losing it and hallucinates she’s on the show. She runs away from her apartment and goes into Manhattan, where she finds the office for the show to ask when she will be invited on. However, because she is having a mental breakdown, she gets sent to the psych ward and goes under electric shock therapy.

Harry and Tyrone head to Miami for some heroin, but his arm is gangrenous, leading to them needing to get to the hospital immediately. As Harry gets treatment, the doctor realizes they’re addicts, and they’re both arrested after the doctor calls the police. Marion is getting desperate financially back home, and she works for a pimp.

As Sara’s friends visit her in the hospital, they’re devastated to see she’s a shell of her former self after the therapy. Harry loses his arm from an amputation, and he starts crying when he realizes Marion isn’t going to come visit him. Tyrone, in withdrawal, is still in prison and is abused by the guards, while Marion is realizing how it all fell apart in New York.

The film ends with them all going into fetal position. Sara dreams of being the host of the show, with Harry, a successful young man, coming on a contestant.

Overall Thoughts

Back then, when I first watched this, our professor warned us that it was going to be disturbing not only because of the content, but because the way the film was edited and shot. And man, this is a master class in how to create a film that makes you uneasy from the technical elements.

Even revisiting it after all of those years, I still feel nauseous watching the movie. It’s such a good movie, despite its harrowing subject, and I think there’s a lot to learn from the perspectives of these characters. Each fell into this situation through different means, and almost all are devastating.

I say watch this if you have the heart and stomach to do so. I can see how this movie might break some people because of the story and editing. The characters and acting are also really realistic—these are people you might know and love that could easily fall into the same situation.

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