I really liked the style, but the overall story somewhat less.

Rating: Null/10 (8 September 2005)

I suppose many would consider "The Machinist" a neo film noir. Although it is filmed in color, the processing gave a very muted color that often looks almost black and white. There is a red car which appears at various times, and it is about the only thing that is bright. The muted colors work very well for this noir story, set on the USA west coast, but filmed in Spain. This is not a story about good people for whom everything works out well in the end. It is a fairly gripping psychological study that for me fell a bit flat in the final act, but well worth watching for the style and Bale.
Christian Bale plays a very skinny Trevor Reznik, a blue collar machinist who says he hasn't slept in a year. When not working, he often looks sleepy when still, but never quite dozes off. He has what would usually be called a girlfriend, whom he sees regularly and cares for, but Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is a prostitute. He leaves her very nice "tips". He also becomes friends with the waitress at the airport coffee shop, Marie, and also leaves her big tips. An accident at work throws everything in turmoil, and as the story progresses we suspect that not all is as it seems.
MAJOR SPOILERS. Michael Ironside is a fellow machinist Miller and while distracted Trevor accidentally starts the machine that Miller was working on. Miller loses part of his left arm, gets a big settlement, but everyone at work turns against Trevor. He ends up being fired. He often sees a red car with a mysterious man in it, he purposely walks in front of a car to get hit so he can report a false hit and run, so the police will identify the red car via its license number. It turns out to be his car that he reported stolen a year earlier. The man isn't real, Trevor finally figures out that he had killed a young boy a year earlier in a hit and run, it was the guilt that was keeping him from sleeping, causing his weight loss (flashbacks showed him healthy), and only after he turned himself in was he able to sleep again. We don't know which, if any, of the characters were real.