Now, this is a mind-trip. Made in Spain, The Machinist follows Trevor Reznik (a severely underweight Christian Bale) as he lives through a year without sleeping. He encounters one problem after another: being involved in two work accidents, a load of bloody fish heads in his freezer, a seeming stalker, a demented carnival ride and the aforementioned year without sleep. But it is really a year? We know, in reality, that a person can not survive for very long without sleep, let alone operate a car or heavy machinery without catching a ZZZ here or there. So that begs the question: what is making him think it's been a year? We definately don't see the passage of a year on the screen. Some event is making Trevor hallucinate and believe things that are not real.
I expected something completely different when I popped The Machinist in the player. I thought it was going to be a serial killer-type thriller, not a psychological thriller. Is it a bad movie? No. Is there some other layer I'm probably not understanding? Most definately. I can mesh a lot of the things Trevor experiences to being a hallucination or daydream of some kind. The one I can't is when he's taking the picture at the carnival. Why does he see someone else? I get that he's placing the mother and child from the end into his life (<-- that's a little oddly put, but I don't want to spoil the end), but from what I remember, he saw someone else in their place also.
It's shot and acted extremely well. Nothing calls attention to itself, except the lack of any meat on Bale's bones. People, he looks like a skeleton--horrible, nasty, hungry...but real. There is no way this part of the movie would have worked without the actor losing the pounds. It's still grotesque, though.