The Devil's Algebra

$Equations$ As most of you who know me well realize, I've always enjoyed a good thriller. The smarter, the better. And I'm even happier if you can mix a dash of noir into a modern thriller and get away with it. I've noted over the past few years a small but respectable list of films have been showing up in largely independent circles that have found ways to make very cerebral topics accessible to people while at the same time making them quite entertaining.

One particular vein has been a lineage of films dealing with mathematics or numbers. Now, there are a lot of these out there that aim quite high. A Beautiful Mind jumps out as obvious. But the films I've reviewed below take a more diabolical approach to the rather dry subject of numbers, and makes them the lynchpin of life and death.

Generally speaking, these are not gory or in any way obscene (though there are exceptions). None of them are horror, though they feature characters under rather extreme circumstances. Several are older films...some of which you have probably seen. But a few are quite recent, and deserve some special attention as I think they might be missed by the general moviegoer. Oh, and all are available for purchase or rental.

Fermat's Room

The first and most recent film is arguably the best on my list. I will warn you, it is a foreign film, which as I've said before isn't for everyone. However it is subtitled from the Spanish (Castilian Spanish, not Mexican Spanish), and I've always argued that watching a subtitled film is much less distracting than people who do not watch them realize. The film takes its name from the famous mathematician Pierre de Fermat, who is most well known for claiming to have written a proof (now lost) for one of the most difficult problems in mathematics. I will not bore you with what the conjecture was, other than to point out that it has recently been solved.

Our story does not involve this particular theorem, however, but a murder in progress. Four famous Spanish mathematicians are the sole individuals who correctly solve a puzzle they received by mail, which when solved invites them to a rare gathering of brilliant theorists who are promised to be presented with the chance to solve a most difficult mathematical enigma. They are each, upon solving their riddle, instructed to go by a pseudonym of a famous mathematician (i.e. Pascal, Galois, Hilbert, and Oliva) instead of by their real name. They are also required to leave their cell phones behind.

Upon arrival, they meet their benefactor, who goes only by the name of Fermat. After dinner, Fermat must excuse himself from the room briefly, and when the door is closed the guests find they cannot leave. They then begin to receive puzzles via a PDA left in the room for them. If they cannot solve each puzzle within a minute, the room begins to shrink until they enter a correct answer. They only have brief minutes between puzzles before the next riddle comes along, giving them about an hour before the room shrinks to less the size of an elevator. During the stress they begin to learn of connections they each have to one another, and piece together why they are in this situation. And they must solve this enigma in order to survive. As the tagline for this film indicates, "Think inside the box, or die".

Believers

The next film is one of the most original I've seen in a while. The Believers is the tale of a group of scientists, philosophers, and mathematicians (calling themselves the Quanta Group) who have become disciples of a man known as the Teacher because he has discovered "The Formula". This equation has, they claim, predicted with perfect precision the exact moments of the end of all life on earth, and the way to escape it. It is reminiscent of the famous (and real) Drake Equation, but in reverse. In terms of modern fiction, it is probably more akin to what has become a famous set of numbers produced by the mythical Valenzetti Equation which in the LOST universe predicts the extinction of our species.

In any case, this story centers on two paramedics who accidentally run across one member of the "cult" who is trying to escape. By being good Samaritans they end up getting kidnapped by other scientists-members who refuse to let them go. They do this because the fact they interacted with one another so close to the "event" may prevent the members of Quanta from escaping because they have now become accidentally entangled (a factual concept in quantum mechanics where two objects become irreversibly linked on the quantum scale). Now imprisoned in an abandoned underground missile complex, the paramedics face the choice of willingly joining the group or being left to die with the rest of humanity (or so the Teacher tells them).

What I find fascinating about this film is the high degree in which it is based on real quantum physics and a branch of mathematics known as Fractal Geometry. The cult's symbol (the Greek ψ) is even the real descriptor for calculating the wave function probability of the position of a particle or set of particles in any physical system. To describe one's ψ, you can determine where we are in reality. Of course the story pushes these real branches of learning into applications that are metaphysical in nature, but in ways that are very thought provoking. It does have a creepy edge to it, but I do recommend it for anyone who likes their sci-fi to have a hard edge of real science behind it.

Primer

Our next selection has won several awards (including two Sundance Awards) and just might be the smartest, under-recognized science fiction thriller of all time...especially when you find out it was made for about $7,000. I have watched it six or seven times, and I'm still catching new things I didn't see the first few times. Primer is about time travel. Now put away your misconceptions, because there is no whiz-bang, no blinking lights, and no special effects. This is all about the drama of the story, and about what happens when you can have absolutely anything you want. Esquire magazine said it best when they hailed Primer as "[t]he headiest, most singular science fiction movie since Kubrick made 2001." The same reviewer went on to say that "anybody who claims he fully understands what's going on in Primer after seeing it just once is either a savant or a liar." Kubrick's potential incarnation isn't everyone's fare…but he cannot be denied as a tension building, clockwork storyteller.

Our two main characters are part of a group of friends who have a small out-of-their-garage business where they build and sell small scale electronics for specialized needs. They have several side projects they work on in the process of trying to find the next big thing. Quite by accident, they make a device that has a very strange effect (which they explain very well in the film, but that is too lengthy to go into here), whereby they generate a field that oscillates in such a way that an object placed in it has a certain probability of exiting the field slightly out of sync with normal time. They don't realize this at first, until one of the things they are experimenting with is contaminated with a bacterium that grows at an impossible rate, at which point they deduce the only possible answer is that the field bends time. So they decide to make a bigger one…one large enough for a person.

The plot gets extremely dense at this point, as they deal with the first paradox-proof time travel theory I've ever seen. I still can't find any holes in the story, and the way the story unfolds is one part Hitchcock, one part The Usual Suspects. I wish this had been a book more than just about any movie I've seen. I highly recommend this, but I warn you that you won't get it all the first time you watch it.

The Cube

I believe most of my friends have probably seen this by now (and if my memory serves, Aeskepulus and I first watched it together). The Cube is as diabolical as it is brilliant. What I love about it is that when you strip away the special effects, it all amounts to a very small cast of characters in two rooms…the perfect ingredients for what would otherwise be a play performance.

I will be brief, because I imagine most people have watched this by now. But for those uninitiated, we have a group of people who wake up trapped inside a maze of cubes. Some cubes are "safe", while others are trapped with devices meant to kill. Each person was abducted, though they don't remember how, and each person was put in the Cube for a reason. There seem to be an endless succession of cubes, one after another, connected by hatches in all six faces. Their only differences are the color of the room and three three-digit numbers marking the entrance of each cube.

After some painful navigations and lost members, one character (the smart one) deduces that there is an underlying pattern to the numbers, and that not only can they tell her which rooms are trapped, but also how to get out of the Cube. It then becomes a race to the exit (and a fight amongst the group) before the maze closes on them forever.

11:14

Ok, I'm cheating a little with this one. This one isn’t as heavy into mathematics; it simply revolves vertiginously around a specific moment…11:14 PM. The story involves a bizarre confluence of circumstances whereby several people’s ordinary lives crisscross in unbelievable ways.

The story starts following one character and we see their perspective until 11:14, at which point the story rewinds and we then follow another character’s viewpoint until they reach 11:14.

However until you see the greater pattern you don’t realize how the entire story is collapsing on top of itself. I really loved the originality of how the various storylines interlace. It also has one of my favorite actors in it, so I am a little biased.

I highly recommend it anytime you want a movie full of those A-ha moments.

π

My final selection is one I know Aeskepulus and Harlequin have both seen. It features Darren Aronofsky’s first full-length film. You may know him from his controversial film A Requiem for a Dream, and his later existential piece, The Fountain. And of course his most recent film’s lead actor has an Oscar nomination this season. However π was an experimental film (and arguably still is). I hated it when I first saw it. But then again, I hated Donnie Darko the first time I saw it, and now I love both of them.

π follows a main character who is a mathematician obsessed with finding the overarching pattern in all of nature, with the aide of a supercomputer he’s built in his apartment named Euclid. He becomes obsessed with finding the underpinning pattern in everything, but his quest centers around the billions of data points generated by the stock market.

Later, he becomes convinced that there is a link to all patterns in nature if one uses Gematria, the esoteric science of assigning numbers to letters (specifically in Greek or Hebrew) and according to the Jewish practice of Kabbalah, finding layers of revelation. The protagonist accidentally stumbles upon the mathematical name of God (216 letters long), which is referenced in Exodus and is called the Shemhamphorasch (which is actually 72 names, and is linked to the holy Tetragrammaton).

Unfortunately, our protagonist discovers that he is meddling with things that have dire consequences. Fans of Phillip K. Dick’s adapted films will love this movie.