5. Pi

(Darren Aronofsky, 1998)

What’s The Story? Pill-popping maths boffin Maxmillian Cohen (Sean Gullette) treads the dark path to a numbingly complex theory: everything in the universe can be predicted through graphology and numeric patterns.

Suspecting he’s about to crack The Code with his Blue Peter-esque homemade supercomputer, shifty representatives of both Wall Street and a Kabbalah sect start to hassle him. Max snaps, and decides to drill out his demons. Literally...

What’s It About? Generally speaking, it’s the old ‘troubled genius’ chestnut, but, in a sense, the film isn’t really about Cohen as such. It’s more of a florid riff on - hold tight - the concept of nonlinear dynamics. Chaos theory.

Aronofsky pokes fun at narcissistic academics setting out to achieve the impossible – in Cohen’s case, finding a pattern that makes sense of apparently chaotic systems.

Weird Fact: A bona fide human brain appears in the film. One prop runner clearly earned his keep...

4. Donnie Darko

(Richard Kelly, 2001)

What’s The Story? Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) sees rabbits. But the rabbit is in his head, or maybe it’s his sister’s boyfriend. Or an acid trip. Or God. Or the wooden head of a bunny in the kitchen... The one certainty is that the world is coming to an end. Very soon...

What’s It About? Love. Anyone can point out the oddity of bunny-suits, '80s tributes and time travel, but this is just a romantic tale of Everyteen Don – forgetting the world, running off with a girl and losing his cherry along the way...

“I don’t care if you’ve seen it 80 times,” says Kelly. “It’s not about mental illness. Gretchen is not a mystical recreation of Rose as a young girl, Cherita Chen isn’t a spy for the Chinese government.”

Given the choice of dying, turning back time and saving his beloved, or living a life without her, Donnie chooses the former. It’s really that simple. Everyone dies. Love survives.

Weird Fact: Donnie was shot in 28 days – exactly the time-span of the film itself.

Next: Being John Malkovich, Eraserhead...