The Machinist

“Kafka meets Freud and David Lynch – an impressive trip into the depths of the human soul” (kino-zeit.de) Trevor Reznik (Christian Bale) hasn't slept for a year. During the day, the emaciated man stands at a machine under the watchful eye of his foreman Tucker. In the evenings, he seeks solace with the prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) – or has the waitress Marie serve him a cup of coffee at the airport café at the same time every day. Trevor works in heavy metal manufacturing, where he meets his new colleague Ivan one day. Distracted by a threatening gesture from Ivan, Trevor's carelessness leads to a serious accident in which one of his colleagues loses his arm. But there is no one named Ivan employed at the company, nor is he known to anyone there. Trevor trusts himself and his perceptions less and less. Yellow notes are supposed to remind him of important things to do, but Trevor can't make sense of some of them—and did he really write them himself? British acting star Christian Bale (“The Dark Knight”) lost nearly 30 kilograms for this role, which is almost a third of his normal body weight. He wasn't the only one who pulled out all the stops for this material with its first-class script. Director Brad Anderson had to move the entire shoot to Spain because he couldn't find any producers in America – even though the story is set in L.A. "This didn't harm the disturbing, beguiling film, on the contrary. Its artificial L.A., staged down to the last license plate, is much more hallucinatory Twilight Zone than the real thing could ever be. And it manages to maintain this unsettling feeling of detached artificiality throughout the entire film. Great! [...] Despite all its thriller elements, ‘The Machinist’ feels like a modern film noir for long stretches, a tapestry of desaturated colors in which Tucker's red '69 Pontiac Firebird stands out like a sore thumb. The Machinist is at times almost torture, yet it is a magnificent film. It is a film that stages the incompleteness of its plot strands as a complex reflection of a sick mind. ‘Lying flashbacks’ and ‘spring devils’ endings' become components of the story that are so skilfully woven into the script and thus completely legitimised that one should not really use these terms at all. [...] ‘The Machinist’ is the oppressively aesthetic psychogram of a tortured mind, a tentative interplay between human loneliness and the hint of overcoming it. And, of course, like so many films of the last three years, ‘The Machinist’ can also be read as a statement on the American self-image. [...] For anyone who still has doubts: definitely go and see it." (Anja Marquardt, on: artechock.de)