A Lot Of Mystery But Still A Bizarre Movie That Didn't Really Pull Me In

Rating: 4/10 (16 December 2009)

Through the opening scenes of the movie, I for some reason immediately thought of "American Psycho" - probably because of Christian Bale and the whole prostitute angle. Then, when it was revealed that Trevor (Bale) hadn't slept for a year (and was obviously losing his grip on reality) I started thinking of "Insomnia." The problem with a movie that makes me think of those two movies is that I didn't care for either one! Same with this. It just didn't hit home with me.
Bale's performance was good. He certainly nailed the part of Trevor - a guy who's obviously going off the deep end and becoming increasingly paranoid. There's also no question that there's enough mystery involved in this as we try to piece together the increasingly bizarre things that are happening in Trevor's life and to come up with an explanation for them. Those two things together mean that this certainly isn't an awful movie, but it also doesn't come anywhere close to the heights of greatness that some seem to have assigned to it. The strong points aside, the story didn't really work that well for me. I had trouble getting into it at the beginning, and even once the mystery finally grabbed me, my own feeling was that there were just too many twists and turns, too much bizarre-ness, and nothing that would even give the viewer a hint of the ultimate solution to the mystery, which eliminated the fun of trying to figure the thing out, which means that the ending certainly came as a surprise to me. Personally, though, I prefer to be surprised because I've figured the mystery out incorrectly, not because there was nothing to allow me to try to figure the mystery out! My own feeling was that it was what might be described as "upper-mediocre." 4/10