An eerie and effective film that plays with the viewer and forces some working out.

Rating: 8/10 (20 April 2007)

The Machinist is a film that displays evidence of numerous things. It proves that Christian Bale is a quality actor, although he'd already done that with American Psycho four years earlier; it proves that there are good films still being made every now and again in an era when sequels and remakes are bringing in most of the cash for the American film industry but it also proves that Spain doesn't need to rely on Almodóvar to make their films appeal to a wider audience.
What's clever about The Machinist is its overall delivery of its subject matter. It's bleak, colourless, eerie and has a distinct slow atmosphere to it. This is put through via the way the character of Trevor Reznik (Bale) talks to other people, because he's tired and very thin, thus rendering him weak. He says he hasn't slept for a year but this may be untrue (as well as some other thing) as things become clearer later on. The film seems like it's a psychological horror as each scene is particularly ambiguous and un-nerving. We're being treated to eerie compositions of strange things but I was never quite sure if I was supposed to feel scared, uneasy or whether I was supposed to be looking out for clues of some sort. A good example can be the ghost train ride scene where a series of uncanny images are flashed at us and a child goes into a frothing fit. When you look back at this scene at the end, it was merely just a fun fair ride and there was nothing too sinister going on at all. A guy and a child goes on a ride and an unfortunate incident happens, nothing else.
But what makes this film particularly effective is that it plays with the viewer. I think most people who see this are so sure that 'soon enough, something really bad will happen' thanks to the eerie atmosphere it has, that they trick themselves into thinking something has. Some iconography of this can be the refrigerator apparently leaking blood and the mysterious memo sticker appearing on a cupboard with a drawing of a stickman attached to a noose, ala 'Hangman' style. When you look at these two things, the leaking fridge can be explained logistically  there was a power-cut at his apartment and the fridge's power was cut off; thus the items of food inside were ruined and started to rot/leak a little. Anything else that raises questions can simply be brushed off using the old 'it was all in his head' trick. This includes the fact he supposedly murders someone in his flat, wraps up the body in a rug and goes to dump it off a pier but when he gets there, there's no body in the rug, and the guy he killed appears behind him as a coastguard on watch.
The fact that Reznik also finds himself in delicate situations on numerous occasions, but seems to do the worst thing possible, is also a point of discussion. When someone looses an arm in some machinery at his factory, it's due to the fact he leans on the wrong button. When he goes round to apologise to someone about something, he rants about a supposed conspiracy against himself and gets thrown out. Also, when he accuses his prostitute friend's supposed ex-boyfriend of stalking him (when really he doesn't exist) he's only making things worse for himself as a certain photograph he found in the guys wallet is actually of him yet he can't see that even though it's right in front of him.
Twinned with this, the people around him suffer a lot more than he does. I think he maps this suffering onto himself; thus taking the weight of other people's problems. Examples are: the prostitute who gets beaten up, the child that has an epileptic fit and the worker that looses his arm. These problems don't affect him at all yet he seems to take the brunt of them and each little thing adds to his delusion.
It may sound like I was unimpressed with The Machinist, but this isn't the case. Any film that makes you think like this and, almost, demands a second viewing can hold its head up high along with other films such as Memento and Twelve Monkeys. The Machinist is a clever, well made and well thought out film that works on many levels as it tackles sensitive subjects such as insomnia, amnesia and mental illness.