Pi (1998)

  Man, this movie was weird.  I don't even know what the hell was going on during most of it.  There's math and Kabbalah and ants and all sorts of stuff.  Darren Aronofsky is a weird, weird dude.  He has a recognizable style, though, I'll give him that.

Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) is a numbers theorist searching for the pattern that will unlock the stock market.  There are some stalkerish corporate people who keep trying to give him a ton of money for this key, but he keeps dodging them.  About the only person he talks to consistently is his old professor (Mark Margolis) who suffered a stroke and retired after trying to map out the mathematical end of Pi.  After reluctantly consulting with some Hasidic Kabbalists, Max believes that the 216-digit number he has stumbled across will somehow allow him to understand the universe.  The weirdness comes in the form of "attacks" Max has of what look like either migraines or cluster headaches, also known as suicide headaches (thanks, Wikipedia!) where he hallucinates, his nose bleeds, and there is some sort of godawful noise.

The entire movie is filmed in a grainy black and white with periods of high contrast and others where everything is muddled.  The Netflix sleeve describes it as "jarring" but I don't think that's really the right word.  It is off-putting but not in a sharp or sudden way.  It's a brilliant piece of work, especially for a first-out-of-the-gate film-maker.  That being said, I'll probably never watch it again.