Darren Aronofsky's nine-feature filmography delivers gruelling, confrontational cinema that foregrounds grossness, pain and psychological collapse. His films range from Biblical epic scale to intimate character tragedies, often provoking debate, censorship and accusations of voyeurism, manipulation and exploitation. Aronofsky studied anthropology and worked as a field biologist, which informs a focus on the mind and extreme human behaviour. He founded a production company at 28 and broke through with Pi at Sundance in 1998. The latest film, Caught Stealing, adapts Charlie Huston's novel into a 1990s New York story that mixes subcultures and criminal conflict, offering a comparatively lighter but existentially threaded tone.
If there is a rule to Darren Aronofsky 's work, it is that any given film from his nine feature-strong oeuvre will be a gruelling watch. Never going easy on the grossness, toe-stubbing, head-drilling, anguish and misery - whether a sweeping Biblical epic (Noah) or a tightly wound ballerina tragedy (Black Swan) - Aronofsky has cemented his status as one of contemporary cinema's most divisive directors.
His work is often met with torrid debate (as well as, occasionally, censorship or bans), the accusations levelled at the director spanning voyeurism, manipulation and exploitation. True to his anthropological roots (after training as a field biologist in Kenya and Alaska as a teen, he studied anthropology at Harvard), the Brooklynite's special subject is usually the mind: he unrelentingly plunders the psyches of his main characters to probe the hellish limits of human behaviour.
Packing a visceral sucker punch, his latest, Caught Stealing, is a wild ride through the medley of subcultures and communities that make up 1990s New York. Adapted for the screen by Charlie Huston from his own novel, Austin Butler's protagonist Hank makes the mistake of agreeing to cat-sit for his punk neighbour (Matt Smith) and winds up at the epicentre of a standoff between feuding drug lords.
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