“The Machinist” (2004)
“No-one ever died of insomnia”.
“No-one ever died of insomnia”.
It’s 1.30am and I have a confession to make. It’s always 1.30am when you haven’t slept for what seems like an entire year and someone is messing with your mind by leaving post-it notes on your refrigerator. Maybe I need some sleep but in all probability I won’t be able to as there’s duplicity in the air, a riddle I can’t solve, and I have a confession to make. Even the confession itself may be a trick of my own imagination or the salve repeatedly placed over an open wound and memories I’m desperate to forget. Who knows? All I do know is it’s 1.30am, it’s always 1.30am, and I have a confession from a dangerous mind that may or may not be as true as those post-it notes you keep leaving for me in a house that it’s crumbling around a shattering mind.
As I’ve traversed the rocky road of life, whenever someone, anyone, be it a current love of my life, a mate, a lifelong friend or passing ship in a sleepless night has asked me whether or not I’ve seen The Machinist, my stock answer has always been that yes I have and it’s an incredible film with a skeletal, anxiety inducing performance from Christian Bale. That much is true. Kind of. For I have seen this film before but not for many a sleepless decade and so I hadn’t bargained for how unsettling and horrifying this film truly is. You know what’s coming, it’s just that you have to go through a paranoid panic attack to get there. The film poster above connects the dots from David Fincher’s Fight Club through to Christopher Nolan’s impeccable Memento. High praise indeed for two films I’m already obsessed with and I have no doubt whatsoever that there will be an insomniac reading this in some faraway future who will revere this film as I do the two masterpieces noted above, or the other immediate film that struck me on this evening’s re-watch, Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. Maybe it’s just that one, repeated, heart breaking scene and maybe it’s the trick of the mind at 1.30am and the memories of a tortured soul that may never find some peace or the relief of some restful sleep.
The stories surrounding the film are legion and I’d bet all the post-it notes in the world that this has become a cult favourite alongside Nolan’s Memento. Christian Bale, post American Psycho and pre donning the bat suit in Nolan’s Batman trilogy is almost unrecognisable as the skeletal machinist living in a world of recurring dreams and nightmares exacerbated by insomnia, manic episodes and a living hell of memories he just can’t forget. The term “skin and bones” barely does justice to the shocking figure cut by Bale in a performance that must be as highly regarded as any within his canon of future work, with the same compliment reserved for co-star Jennifer Jason Leigh a decade on from Single White Female and a decade before stealing everyone’s thunder in Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight.
Aitana Sánchez-Gijón may break your heart so beware. Be careful of the devil on your shoulder too, the literary works of Dostoyevsky and those damned post-it notes in a film so drained of colour that it almost looks black and white but is rather a dirty pale green before, like Memento, the film switches to a warmer, brighter, colourful glow. These seemed mere fleeting moments in a panic attack of a film aided and abetted by the haunting strings and musical soundtrack from composer Roque Baños (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, In The Heart of The Sea) and all under the direction of Brad Anderson in only his lucky seventh outing in the directors chair.
I had seen The Machinist before.
I just hadn’t appreciated how fantastic it was.
Sleep well.
Thanks for reading. Please see my “Film” library for more spoiler free appraisals of hundreds of films old and new, or linked below are my three most recently published reviews from this year:
“Asteroid City” (2023)
“You can’t wake up if you don’t go to sleep”.medium.com
“Greatest Days” (2023)
A million love songs later?medium.com
“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol.3 (2023)
“It really is good to have friends”.medium.com