Better off dead

Rating: 6/10 (25 February 2005)

A machinist's life has become a paranoid drifty existing;insomnia haunts him,skeleton-body makes everybody think he's doing drugs,visions and hallucinations make him confuse reality with past. Bale's interpretation of an anorexic at the final state of gravity is amazing;at the same he lives and works just like a machine-that's what somebody becomes when their lives are no longer their own property. The movie is playing with our psychic all the time;the spectator is obsessed at the very beginning with the protagonist and his mental disturb,the source of which is kept a secret until the final episode. Kudos to those who see in blindness. For Bale himself is trying to fix the puzzle and explain all the strange things and visions occurring to him:I found great the idea with the clock always stuck at 1.30 pm every time he was seeing the waitress;the road 666 trip wasn't bad at all and his double-face,the new machinist,was an image of all he wanted to escape from-his sin.
What was keeping my interest growing was the simple fact that the skinny was surrounded by all kinds of accidents in his paranoia:accident is a key word here and accidents are caused by machines... So Bale,a machinist,killed a little boy by accident at 1.30 pm,road 66,whose mother's figure running for her child behind the car appears as his waitress in his dreamy consciousness;Bale escaped. Paranoia,anorexia,schizophrenia are after him from this moment on; he's a killer against his will and he repays his sin with the price of his...awakening. Like after a nightmare by day,he falls asleep at last(after a year of insomnia)in his prison cell,returning to what he could dare to call reality.And this is his redemption.
When I first saw the movie and the lights were on after the final lines,nobody in the cinema made a move or said a thing;we were all sitting still for about 5,10 min.I don't think they all fell asleep.
When somebody takes a life by accident,all his life is spoiled.No matter what. That's what The Machinist is for. Not a movie to be seen by paranoids!!!