The Best Darren Aronofsky Movies

Summary

• Requiem for a Dream is Aronofsky’s masterpiece, delving into the horrors of addiction and its extreme consequences.
• Black Swan, a psychological horror masterpiece, showcases intense performances and explores mental health in performance art.
• The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, highlights the brutal world of wrestling and earned Rourke critical acclaim and awards.

If you want to explore complex topics, philosophical ideas, and some truly excellent psychological drama, Oscar-nominated director Darren Aronofsky is the perfect filmmaker to turn to. With works like Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and A24’s The Whale, he brings an original auteur quality to his films that really dive into the psychology of his characters in ways no other filmmaker has achieved.

Aronofsky’s movies like to challenge their audience and bring about intense experiences that you wouldn’t otherwise feel with any other movie, and have characters that are also memorable and well-written. While he doesn’t have as big a body of work as other filmmakers, here are all of his achievements thus far.

While the following Darren Aronofsky films are available to stream or purchase on VOD, he also directed 2023’s Postcard from Earth for The Las Vegas Sphere Experience, which counts more like a live venue concert event, so we won’t include it here.

8

Noah

With a cast containing such big names and Aronofsky receiving a rare huge blockbuster film budget, the director’s retelling of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark fell largely flat, almost comparable to the disastrous reception of Ridley Scott’s Exodus: Gods and Kings, which ironically came out in the same year. While it may have had its visuals going for it, everything else was not as stellar.

Telling this particular Biblical story through cinema just didn’t work in the way it was intended, and it therefore even landed Darren Aronofsky on the shortlist for Worst Director and Worst Screenplay at the 2014 Razzies. The performances of acting giants Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, and Anthony Hopkins will probably be your least favorite as well. His 2017 Biblical movie, Mother!, proved a much better effort.

7

The Fountain

The Fountain is an even bolder fantasy, historical, and sci-fi epic than Noah for Aronofsky. The premise feels way ahead of its time and is quite Black Mirror-esque, or something of a hybrid made by The Wachowskis.

You have three parallel storylines tied to a tree that grants you eternal life; one during the Spanish Inquisition, another in the present day, and another in the 26th century featuring a character traveling through space.

Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz star in recurring roles throughout the timelines and the theme of mortality is at the center of it all. The most gripping is the present-day storyline, where Hugh Jackman is a scientist seeking the Tree of Life as a cure for his wife’s cancer. The entire film plays out like a fever dream of a fairy tale, that also delivers some of the most astounding visuals from the early 2000s.

6

Pi

Pi, precisely named after the mathematical constant starting with 3.14, was Aronofsky’s feature film debut. It’s presented in black-and-white and is about an obsessed mathematician who is trying to see the world through mathematical patterns and numbers, and has developed a special computer he calls Euclid.

It also features actor Mark Margolis as his close friend and mathematics mentor, Sol, the start of many collaborations between Margolis and Aronofsky.

The film exhibits a psychological Lynchian narrative about a paranoid mathematician’s obsession, with Hasidic Jews seeking his genius mind to unlock numerical messages in the Torah and others to manipulate the stock market.

There are also some disturbing moments, including one involving a power drill, and it makes you reflect on what happens when mathematical and theoretical geniuses, whether it be Pi’s Maximillian Cohen or J. Robert Oppenheimer, lose their sanity.

5

Mother!

Mother! is a psychological horror movie as well as a criticism of religion, especially of God and the treatment of Mother Earth by humanity. It’s told in the unique Aronofsky way, with Javier Bardem’s Him acting as the creator of Mother Earth, Jennifer Lawrence’s character. All the moral corruption and death humans bring about when left to their own will is seen through her eyes, with stories from the Hebrew Bible also incorporated.

If you’ve studied the Bible, you’ll understand what this film is trying to say, but it’s still not a narrative for everyone; there’s a lot going on here to unpack in just one viewing. However, the themes are spot-on, the setting claustrophobic, and witnessing Mother’s perspective on the harrowing situations going on until that chaotic and unforgettable ending is a feat of masterful writing, editing, and directing.

4

The Whale

The Whale is a feature film adaptation of the 2012 play of same name written by Samuel D. Hunter. It follows a morbidly obese online learning English teacher who hides his identity from students out of embarrassment and fear of harassment about his condition. He gets care from his nurse, Liz, and is visited by a missionary and his rebellious and demanding teenage daughter, Ellie, who doesn’t treat him kindly.

Brendan Fraser won the Oscar for his major comeback as Charlie in The Whale, and the prosthetic suit he wore for the role also won the film Best Achievement in Makeup. This is an emotionally charged movie stylistically filmed in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and to see the contrasting kindness of Charlie even in his worst hours, and how much he loves his daughter despite her not feeling the same, is a powerful experience.

3

Black Swan

Black Swan is a masterpiece of unsettling psychological horror. There are moments that will leave you in genuine terror and shock, and you also get some eerie visuals of what it means to assume the titular role in a rendition of Swan Lake. Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis in their quest as rivals for the role of the Black Swan also created both actresses’ best performances, with Portman earning her first Oscar.

Black Swan is an examination of one’s competitive psyche going into overdrive for a part you desperately want, told from the point of view of a ballerina, and also explores themes of doppelgängers that Aronofsky got inspired by from Dostoevsky’s The Double. It paints a thought-provoking image of mental health in performance art.

Black Swan was also nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, and Darren Aronofsky was nominated for the Best Director Oscar.

2

The Wrestler

Aside from ballet dancers, scientists, mathematicians, Biblical figures, and people struggling with obesity, Darren Aronofsky also made a movie about a wrestler, which might make you double take. The Wrestler stars Mickey Rourke as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, an aging wrestler who’s forced into retirement after surviving a heart attack, and it’s become the director’s most critically acclaimed film.

The scenes in the wrestling arena are quite brutal and well-shot. Being a former professional boxer himself, Mickey Rourke both embodied and pummeled his role as The Ram, which ultimately won him the Golden Globe and got him an Oscar Nomination.

He’s just so natural, authentic, and perfect as the character, and the supporting cast of Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood are equally fantastic (with Tomei also being nominated for an Oscar).

1

Requiem For A Dream

Darren Aronofsky’s most profound and valuable gift to cinema, and a masterpiece effort on all fronts, is Requiem for a Dream. In a nutshell, this adaptation of Hubert Selby Jr.’s 1978 novel could be considered horror for people going through addiction. Though the film’s title makes it seem surreal and Lynchian, Aronofsky uses the medium to explore the extreme lengths addiction can go.

Following the case studies of four central characters, one is an older lady with dreams of being on TV but who quickly gets addicted to diet pills after being forced to take them before her appearance. Meanwhile, her son, Harry, his girlfriend, Marion, and their friend, Tyrone, all fall into the dangers of heroin addiction.