The truth is, this being that walks among us, but its “tragedies” lies in the fact that it is an unconscious, mute “being” that has been floundering within us since we found, sometimes we lose contact with it, we move away from it, and then we return to it as lost and repentant; And this is how Trevor discovered the truth! In a movie full of excitement and shocking facts.
The Machinist is a 2004 mystery and thriller film directed by Brad Anderson and starring Christian Bale as Trevor Resnick, and Jennifer Jason Les also co-starring in the film.
The story of the movie The Machinist
Trevor, the worker who suffers from sleep difficulties and constant insomnia, brings him close to a year in which he slept only a few hours! Then he begins to see different hallucinations, such as the appearance of a worker with a distorted face in the factory that no one else sees, and the presence of notes written on his refrigerator that he does not know who wrote them, which made him suffer from a thinness that makes him almost invisible.
When the subconscious turns into people and images, moving around you in your reality, this is hell. This is what Trevor looks like, a person suffering from chronic insomnia that has all the nightmares in front of him and experiences them daily. Imagine that the demon of nightmares in Greek mythology is Incubus, or the gathoom that sits on your chest while you are sleeping and makes you wake up from your sleep in terror and in a state of paralysis or temporary disability in your body. He lives you throughout the day by twenty-four hours, reducing your life to the heights of misery and darkness, dull green or gray and black, smells of machine lubricating oils, trying to wake up, but how do you wake up from a nightmare if you are not asleep!!
Trevor was a mechanized being with all the rigor and meticulousness of the mechanics, with some holes or breaches of the daily order. His acquaintance with Stevie as well as his favorite spot in the airport cafeteria and the kind waitress Marie played by the Italian actress (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón) who She prefers coffee and cake.. Then he returns to the same cruel and lifeless mechanics, until he meets a person named (Evan), who is eccentric and because of his eccentricities, Trevor’s mind wanders during his work and causes a colleague’s arm to be cut.
He gets a warning of dismissal if the incident repeats, although he insisted on the presence of a person named Evan who made him absent-minded after drawing the mark of slaughter on his neck, and his boss denies the existence of a person with this name, and it is not even on the workers’ payroll.
Evan’s presence intensifies in Trevor’s life until he finds salvation and appears with every attempt by Trevor to sleep, even if only for a few seconds. The salvation that comes from understanding the signals of the subconscious mind is Trevor’s salvation.
It is worth noting that Christopher Bell lost thirty kilograms of weight in order to play this role and was planning to lose fifty grams, but the director estimated that Billy would suffer from major health problems if he went down to the weight of fifty kilograms, as it was the largest axis in the film and led The role is mythical, although the film did not achieve any commercial success in the cinema window, unfortunately.
The director crafted a set of wonderful scenes in this film, scenes scattered and containing pieces of the puzzle in a very clever way, and the replacement in the characters was wonderful, breathtaking tricks and a movie that does not reveal the puzzle until the last second and here is the genius of directing.
We will be touched by the spectrum of Dostoevsky’s writings and characters in moments as we follow the character of Trevor groaning under the torture of conscience. Trevor’s character sends us an amazing mixture of Raskolnikov, brothers Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov and Prince Myshkin. Including the way in which anxious and exciting questions are asked to the viewer, and perhaps the most prominent of them at the beginning, why is Trevor weak and emaciated? Why is he delirious? Why is he a skeleton more than a normal human being? Then who is Evan, who suddenly appears and works with him in the same factory, and who sees that he seeks to destroy and eliminate him? What is the secret of those scraps of paper on his refrigerator? And those weird cartoons? Which we will discover later that it is nothing but Trevor’s mental work and part of his subconscious and memories.
The film provides us with an opportunity to learn about one of the paranoia cases, diagnose it, and formulate the psychological changes of its patient. We find Trevor and his lack of intimate relationships “if we exclude his relationship with Stevie”, and his clear tendency to depression and his suffering from severe anorexia and lack of sleep push Trevor to the edge of insanity, and the director finally shows us in the visual background of this narrative the incident that occurred to Trevor a year ago when he was He drives his car fast while returning from a hunting trip, and in the moment he is looking for a cigarette lighter, the car swerves, which leads to it crashing into a child, so Trevor chooses to run away, and from that moment on, he has a growing sense of guilt and his depression is steadily increasing
It even turns into a psychotic state of visual and auditory hallucinations closely attached to it, reaching something like psychological insanity.
Here we are in front of one of the most complex and complex characters;
On the other hand, the director does not beg our instincts to arouse in us feelings of approval for the film, but rather draws us to the film until the last moment to know the fate of Trevor through a dark and gloomy background that matches the main orientation of the film by talking about the concept of crime and salvation.
How bleak life would be if the past surrounded us, not only in our dreams, but in every real moment we live, and our dreams overlap and mix between what is real and what is pure illusion or imagination, every time Trevor tries to fall asleep Evan appears in his faint presence, which means In the language of reality, that at that moment he is asleep and that Evan is part of his dream that begins to form as soon as he falls asleep, let us also remember that Miller, whose arm was amputated, says that Trevor was asleep at the moment he asked him for help, but we also know that Trevor at that moment was Evan is watching.
In general, Trevor is a sad, confused person who is unable to distinguish between dream and reality due to his preoccupation with his obsessions, which are caused by the basis, as it seems to us, is the accident of Nicholas’ death. It may seem like it at first, and the director dealt cleverly with the development of the plot of the film to the end,
This is a film that presents more questions than it provides answers, and perhaps here lies one of the most important aspects of its quality and its ability to mix truth with illusion, and its attempt to deceive the viewer often in terms of not distinguishing between the boundaries that separate them, which seem completely unclear to Trevor, the details of daily life Which some of us don’t pay attention to seems very important to Trevor, the lighter in his truck takes an important space for him, cleaning the bathroom floor and writing down his purchases, these details will appear important when approaching the last scenes of the movie, and the viewer can’t be sure of that until he reaches a conclusion that sees Evan is In fact it is part of Trevor himself or his imagination, or rather it is his guilt that haunts him until he has to make the healthy choice (turning himself in to the police).
As a convincing ending, or at least satisfactory in the least, to explain all the mysteries contained in the film.
When we see this skeleton, we get a mysterious, but strong feeling of solidarity with it, as if you want to feed and take care of it
, as the hero presents us in an interesting way, whether in terms of narration or photography.
The actor “Christian Bell” was able to embody feelings of dread and panic with remarkable skill. Indeed, it is an exceptional role. Nevertheless, the feature of the film remains the ability to recreate Dostoevsky’s atmosphere with high accuracy, deep penetration into the human psyche, and portray the most peculiar and strangest of human thoughts. Especially those tainted with human evil, faith and lack thereof, and unjustified crime, those ideas that we do not dare to declare in public even though we think about them and occupy a significant part of our intellectual system, which Dostoevsky considers a feature shared by all human beings, as each of us has the ability to act. Direct or indirect crime and evil, but in fact we – according to Dostoevsky – are nothing but evil people who feel pleasure and pleasure to see the sufferings and misfortunes of others.
Around these thoughts and worlds, the film tries to talk about crime and salvation in a way that overlaps the feeling of fear and pessimism in a serious and non-vulgar way. Dark and gloomy commensurate with the main orientation of the film, which is not without intelligence in photography and the dedication of that foggy atmosphere in the dream and the feeling of guilt.
It’s a difficult and disturbing movie, and some may see that the movie twisted a lot, like its characters, before reaching its conclusion. But we can at least discern the illusion from the truth. “I just want to sleep,” he says, as Reznick chooses, as he is led into his cell at the end and lets us hope he falls asleep more easily than most of us after watching this dark, twisting movie.
