Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #308: The Machinist (2004).

 

Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) is a factory machinist with such a bad case of insomnia he hasn't slept in a year, and it's left him dangerously emaciated. His appearance and behaviour are already alienating his co-workers, who turn against him fully when he's involved in an accident where one of them, Miller (Michael Ironside) gets his left arm caught in the machinery and loses it. Trevor is blamed for the accident but claims a co-worker named Ivan, who nobody else sees or even knows of, distracted him. Privately, Trevor finds romance with prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and waitress Maria (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), who works at an airport diner Trevor frequents, and he absorbs himself in classic Russian novels, but none of these refuges can solve his mounting paranoia and continued lack of sleep.

The Machinist intends to lift the veil on insomnia, and the resultant paranoia, at their most extreme, and that's territory too infrequently explored in mainstream cinema. But while Bale's commitment to his role (he lost over 28kg for it) pays off with a dynamite performance, and Scott Kosar's screenplay is empathetic and unflinching, everything else here is, I think, misjudged and even timid, and that's all because of Brad Anderson's direction. How he visualises this narrative simply feels much too static, detached and conventional for a thriller overtly about paranoia. Where a considerably more unsubtle approach would, I think, have more powerfully conveyed Trevor's mental state, the result of the approach Anderson instead took struck me as blandly suspenseless and even indifferent. It reminded me somewhat of David Fincher but mind you, I've never liked any of his movies either. Plus, Roque Banos' score is so understated it may as well not even be there.

Overall, this Machinist is very played, but I think his machine needed cogs of an entirely different kind. 6/10.