Uh, so what?

Rating: 5/10 (6 October 2005)

Recap: Trevor Reznik suffers from insomnia, in fact he claims not to have slept for a year. And he has lost a lot of weight. So, his life revolves around three places. An all night open café at an airport, a prostitute called Stevie and his work at a factory. It is at the factory he first meets Ivan, an odd character. One day a co-worker asks Reznik to help him, but Reznik gets distracted by Ivan and an accident were the co-worker loses his arm is the result. This is the point were Reznik really start to slip into a strange behavior. Management at the factory claims to know nothing about Ivan and his friends at the factory turns their backs on him. At the same time mysterious messages appear at Rezniks refrigerator. He believes that he is the target of some plot, and that Ivan has the key. But Ivan is hard to catch, and Reznik starts to doubt what is real and what is not.
Comments: First, it is a very well made film. The directing is superb, with a lot of hints, clues and references planted around the movie. Use of music, sound effects and visual keys are used in a nice balance. So there is no wrong there. And there is no fault in the acting either. The focus is heavy on Bale/Reznik, and he does it very well. You might actually think that Bale went a little too far with the weight loss, as he is scarily thin in the movie. Well, that's his decision and it do augment the message of Reznik not being very well. In total, I can't actually find any problem with the making of the movie. Instead it is the story that fails. It totally failed to connect, and I found myself not really caring what happened. I sat in the cinema, saw Reznik acting crazy and thought: "Aha, OK... so what?". The story lacks the ability to reach out to the audience. I couldn't identify with Reznik, nor could I feel sympathy for him. Actually I didn't have any feelings about what Reznik did that could engage me in the story, not sympathy, not wonder, not anger. Nothing. This movie is proof of that you can do everything right in a production, but still fail. You need the story to carry the movie. Still I hesitantly rate it a 5, only because of the directing and acting.
5/10