Modern Hallucination Backed by Classic Hitchcock Score  8 (very good)

Rating: 8/10 (2 October 2005)

Taking heed of the advice of my good friend and IMDb correspondent "The Oscillator," I searched out a DVD copy of THE MACHINIST and was rapt in suspense from beginning to end.
Christian Bale plays an emaciated Trevor Reznik who after a year of insomnia starts to lose his mind. As with any well done film about insanity, THE MACHINIST casts a nightmarish cloud of confusion over what is real and what is hallucination. No one knows what's going on, and it appears that the key to the puzzle rest deep on the oceanic floor of Reznik's subconscious.
Brad Anderson, poised to direct a 2006 remake of Romero's The Crazies, does a nice job of stringing together quiet, eerie scenes that culminate in periodic epileptic fits of psychosis. Wasting away in his delusional world of half-sleep, Reznik causes a horrific accident at the machine shop. All of his coworkers, including his nasty boss are conspiring against him, or so he thinks. Slowly Reznik gets the feeling that the conspiracy against him is deeper than it appears and that some of his coworkers don't really exist. To make things worse, someone is sticking random sticky-notes on his refrigerator.
One glaring point of distraction, though, was that I was constantly asking myself, God, how did Christian Bale lose so much weight for the part? For those who don't know Bale, you might think man, that guy's skinny. But for the millions of Christian Bale fans out there, simply seeing his face in THE MACHINIST might conjure up a myriad of irrelevant questions from "How much does he resemble that British kid in Empire of the Sun?" to "How in the world did he wind up in that awful Batman Project?" Sorting through different images of Bale in your head, from stick figure to schoolboy to bat, could be called entertainment. For me it gets kind of distracting.
Fortunately for the audience the macabre storyline remains tangled and dizzyingly suspenseful right up to the last five minutes where everything is unraveled and the mystery is explained. As always in this genre the bulk of the entertainment behind THE MACHINIST lies not in the final five minute ennui but in the preceding 90 minute cloud of schizophrenic psychosis. For another movie that has the same effect, I highly recommend Angel Heart (1987) with Mickey Rourke and Robert Deniro.
One final note, the score was excellent. It had a classic feel to it that made me think of Hitchcock's PSYCHO. An appropriate score (or an appropriate absence of one) is more than half the battle in any film, and the score behind THE MACHINIST proves that some Hollywood formulas for suspense never get old.
JY
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