Maybe Bales best performance?

Rating: 9/10 (6 September 2018)

The Machinist is most famous for Christian Bale's remarkable weight loss. While his disturbingly emaciated frame undeniably acts as a striking visual metaphor for the notion of 'guilt eating the soul', the film is much more than an exercise in extreme method acting. Bale could of played this role 20 pounds over weight and I suspect it still would have had the same haunting power.
Bale is wonderful here. As a horrifically sleep deprived, guilt ridden man slipping into psychosis this may well be his most memorable and complex performance. I can only speculate that Bale wasn't Oscar nominated because this type of genre film making is simply not recognized by the academy.
This is a shame because the Machinist is the rare marriage of a superlative central performance meeting exceptional film making. It is no mean feat to make a film that is thrilling, unsettling and that also packs an emotional wallop but Brad Anderson has somehow managed to pull it off.