Watch: Darren Aronofsky’s Assault on the Senses in ‘Requiem for a Dream’

Given that the eyes and the ears are the only two sense organs film can access (setting aside ersatz experiments with scratch-and-sniff giveaways at theaters), if a director wanted to make sensory overload part of a film’s experience, the key would be to make visual and auditory elements larger than life, so that they practically jump out of the screen at the viewer. And that, it seems, is what Darren Aronofsky has done with ‘Requiem for a Dream," a film of addiction and humiliation for which the word "harrowing" would be a gross understatement. In this dynamic and startling video, Jorge Luengo focuses on Aronofsky’s jarring close-ups and aggressive in-your-ears sound effects to make an elegant point about the film: that its sensual experience is a mainline, if you will, to its thematic concerns.