Freakish look at self hatred

Rating: 9/10 (27 October 2007)

Christian Bale went above and beyond in the making of this film about a man who is literally killing himself. Trevor hasn't slept in a year and is having hallucinations and is slowly starving himself. It opens with him rolling up a body in a rug and bring it to a beach to dispose of it and then flashes back and forth between reality and a dream like state. Trevor has this obsession with bleaching his hands as if to get rid of some invisible dirt and frequents a coffee shop in the airport at 1:30am every night. He is being followed or is following a man known only as Ivan who claims to be a co-worker with toes on his fingers. He writes everything down on post-it notes and becomes even more confused when a post-it appears on his fridge with a hang man game that is spelling out a 7 letter word ending in "er". The skeleton of a man that was once Christian Bale is scary. He really didn't eat to prep for this role and is disgustingly thin (and I like the thin guys but wow to thin.) Very well shot Brad Anderson did a fantastic job of turning Bercelona Spain into Los Angeles.