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THE
MACHINIST
6/10
Spain 2004 : Brad ANDERSON : 102 mins
The most remarkable feature of stylish B-movie psychological chiller The
Machinist is the genuinely horrifying weight-loss endured by its
leading man Christian Bale. Having bulked up for the gym-pumped role
of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho a few years back,
the Welsh actor has now virtually turned himself into a walking bag
of bones as Trevor Reznik, a severely insomniac factory-worker whose
chronic sleep deprivation leads to increasingly terrifying hallucinations.
As Trevor starts to doubt his sanity, he finds himself drawn into what
seems to be some kind of complicated murder-plot revolving around the
sinister Ivan (John Sharian). Feeling himself sliding into an abyss
of paranoia, Trevor confides his fears to sympathetic hooker Stevie
(Jennifer Jason Leigh) and friendly waitress Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon).
But who can be trusted? And who, if anyone, is what is they seem?
Apart from one unexpectedly larkish ghost-train sequence (which happens
to be the most striking, imaginative and memorable in the whole picture) The
Machinist is a somewhat dour experience, an all-too-effective journey
into a severely troubled mind. It works best as a character-study of
the tormented Trevor - Scott Kosar's script is somewhat less effective
in terms of the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of the twist-film genre, and
attentive viewers will probably work out most of what's going on quite
early in the game
 But while the predictable final revelations may not break any new ground,
Anderson nevertheless knows how to construct a suspenseful narrative.
He's assembled a remarkable cast for what is really quite pulpy, small-scale
material: freakish-looking unknown Sharian more than holds his own in
his numerous scenes with the painfully hollowed-out Bale, while Leigh
and veterans Michael Ironside and Anna Massey inject a welcome degree
of classy professionalism. Backed up by a suitably Hitchcockian score
by Raque Banos, cinematographer Xavi Gimenez creates a night-clammy backdrop
of cobalt blues and steely greys - an ominously off-kilter world whose
strangeness is partly explained by the fact that this very dark-looking
US-set film was, incredibly, shot in the suburbs of sunny Barcelona.
3rd October, 2004
(seen 21st August : UGC Edinburgh : press show - Edinburgh
Film Festival)
click
HERE for
our full coverage of the 2004 Edinburgh Film Festival
by Neil
Young
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