Just about every review of The Machinist you’ll read will begin with a pronouncement of Christian Bale’s unfathomably disturbing sixty-three pound weight loss to play central character, Trevor Reznik. This review, self-evidently, will begin no differently. Indeed, the publicity stills for the picture can do little to convey the arresting image of Bale cast in shadow – his eye sockets deep and dark, his razor sharp ribcage almost tearing through his gaunt, drawn skin. Fortunately the risk of the actor’s looks overshadowing the way he acts lasts no more than the first few scenes, for Bale puts in a memorably weighty performance in this superior psychological thriller.
The Machinist opens at night. Reznik is preparing to dispose of a body wrapped in an old carpet, near what appears to be an abandoned industrial estate. He is caught midway through by the glare of an inquisitive guard’s torch. Tellingly for a film that is in essence a journey through one man’s disjointed mental state, the film then resorts to flashback to provide that unsettling opening with a backstory.
Reznik it transpires is a heavy machine operator who has not slept and scarcely eaten for a year. After Ivan (John Sharian) a ragged and barely acknowledged new co-worker flashes him a goading stare, Reznik accidentally sets off a drilling tool that causes another worker, Miller (Michael Ironside) to lose an arm. The scene is protracted and painful, and there is something so terrifyingly inevitable about the motion of the drill, that you cannot help but share in the character’s helplessness. Bale is truly mesmerising in these macabre moments, and fortunately there are plenty of them.
Reznik becomes convinced that there is a conspiracy against him, and it seems he has good reason to. After the accident, sinister post-it notes start appearing on the door of his refrigerator; he becomes convinced that Miller precipitates a revenge ‘accident’ that nearly tears off his arm, and he finds a picture of a missing co-worker fishing with the brutishly unnerving Ivan. Indeed it is that character more than any other, who becomes the source of Reznik’s growing neurosis, repeatedly appearing at the same random places as him. The cruel irony is that in seeking to unravel the mysterious circumstances of Ivan’s arrival, Reznik himself comes apart - his only solace being the occasional company of two women.
One of those women is Jennifer Jason Leigh who puts in a convincing turn as Stevie - a fairly wasted though caring prostitute to whom Reznik turns for advice and infrequent oral relief. Marie (Aitana Sanchez-Gijon), a pretty waitress who works the twilight shift at an airport coffee shop Reznik frequents every night, also offers him some respite from his insomnia. That it is to an airport he goes to establish a friendship seems a taunting metaphor for his inability to flee his demons; he’s simply too rooted in his paranoia to escape. Further, at different times both women tell Reznik ‘if you were any thinner you wouldn’t exist’. The statement points to precisely what he most desires, and in its repetition, gives voice to Reznik’s increasing sense of deja-vous - the signifier of a glitch in the seminal state-of-mind movie The Matrix, is here representative of the character’s fractured mental state.
Reznik’s bleak interiority is superbly reflected in the cinematography of Xavi Gimenez and Chalie Jiminez. In The Machinist, they have created a palette largely drained of colour, all blue-greys and blacks, punctuated by smacks of Ivan’s vivid red Pontiac Firebird. In this film you see the world though the eyes of its protagonist - imposing and shadowy. The camera is also responsible for highlighting numerous clues that point to the film’s eventual Big Reveal: the pop of a cigarette lighter, a landmark water tower, a Ghost train’s passage to hell are all shot with barely missible significance. Perhaps most notable of all is the fleeting shot of a Rubik’s cube in the kitchen drawn of Reznik’s murky flat – a symbol for a mixed-up mind in which a series of events seem to no longer resemble a logical, cohesive pattern.
With The Machinist, director Brad Anderson (Sessions 9) does for the psychological- thriller what Alexandre Aja did for the horror-thriller in last years impressively stylish Switchblade Romance, borrowing heavily from the best in the genre and producing something that is, in part at least, an homage. Anderson’s film in both storyline and photography references the work of Hitchock (Vertigo, Psycho), Lynch (Mulholland Drive) and Fincher (Fight Club). This theme also permeates the score by Roque Banos, which is unashamedly Hitchockian. But all these composite parts work well together and even though the tricksy plot reveal at the end of the film isn’t that much of a revelation given all the clues that preceed it, there is something hugely satisfying in seeing this jigsaw puzzle finally fitting together. The Machinist, somewhat ironically given Reznik’s climactic realisation, is a film you will not easily forget.
C4 Forums 
