Requiem for a Dream
Over one year, a widow hooked on diet pills and three young heroin users chase their dreams as addiction pulls each of them into ruin.
Academy Award Best Actress 2001 nominee (Ellen Burstyn)
Across the seasons of a single year, the film follows four people in Brooklyn: Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow who becomes dependent on amphetamine diet pills, and her son Harry, his girlfriend Marion and his friend Tyrone, whose heroin use hardens into desperation. Their separate hopes narrow into compulsion.
The film traces how fantasy and craving drive addiction toward psychosis and the disintegration of the self, cutting between the four lives as each collapses. It gives a therapist an unsparing study of dependency and delusion. It earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in 2001 for Ellen Burstyn, and is adapted from the novel Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.
Director
Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky is an American film director, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1969. He is known for psychologically intense films including Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan, and The Whale. His work returns repeatedly to characters gripped by compulsion: addiction that narrows a life, the body pushed past its limits, and the punishing drive toward perfection. For a clinically minded viewer, his films offer close portraits of people whose private obsessions reshape how they see themselves and others.
Details
- 2000
- United States
- English
- Film