167 out of 177 people found the following review helpful:

Cult Classic!

Alistair McFarlane from Leeds, England, 25th March, 2005

Christian Bale looking his worst and acting at his best. If you like films that make you think, then this film is awesome and not to be missed. Though it's sinistercism will mean it's not everybones cup of tea. Scarred throughout with an underlying dark feel to it. The machinist takes you into the mind of Bale's charachter Trevor who suffers from extreme insomnia. As the film progresses it allows you and Trevor to simultaneously unravel the trail of clues leading to the cause of his insomnia. The backdrop of the average dull toned town that he lives in adds even more realism to this must see film.

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50 out of 60 people found the following review helpful:

Fantastic!

Amichaelglg from Surrey, 2nd May, 2005

This was one of the BEST films I have seen for a very very long time. Although the previous post said it was predicatble...Well, it is like saying The Sixth Sense was predicatble !
If you have similar tastes to me and loved Gladiator, The Sixth Sense, Butterfly Effect, Assault On Precinct 13, The Notebook, and many others that don't initially spring to mind then you must SEE this film. I just cannot praise it highly enough !

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45 out of 56 people found the following review helpful:

A movie that will make you think.

Felicity from Horsham, West Sussex, 9th April, 2005

This is a truly wonderful and scary movie. Christian Bale looks scarier even than his character in American Psycho, yet this has to be his best role to date. This film will keep you guessing until the end.

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35 out of 39 people found the following review helpful:

Intriguing, infuriating insomniac

ATfilmcritic from London, 17th March, 2005

Chilling, compelling psychological mystery, which, despite a mostly predictable denouement, remains gripping and disturbing from beginning to end; and the incohesive whole is driven fiercely by Bale’s astonishing commitment.

His ferocious, powerful performance should be marked down as one of the greatest human achievements in cinema- starved down to an unrecognizable bare-bones of a person (“If you were any thinner…you wouldn’t exist”), Bale’s extraordinary feat of losing 63 pounds, transforming his usual muscular self into a skeletal ghost, is the greatest physical weight loss in film history. His dedication shows, and ultimately lifts the film from mediocrity.

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disturbing

wimbowimmy from , 11th June, 2009

this film is consistently intruguing and atmospheric. i found it too dark and sinister, though and had to stop watching about half way through - life doesn't have to be this awful! i found myself reminded alot of jacob's ladder with tim robbins. while i was watching, i looked the film up on wikipedia, and found that despite being set in a west coast American town, it is filmed entirely in Barcelona. This made me see the whole thing differently - somehow knowing that i was watching an English man (Bale) walking around a Spanish town drained the film of some American pizzazz for me.

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disappointing

A Customer from Rugby, 8th June, 2009

I rented this film based on the trailer but I have to say the trailer had the best bits of the whole movie in that 90 seconds or so.

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Dark

A Customer from Basingstoke, 7th June, 2009

Strange film, not easy to understand. Very dark and sinister. Can't day I loved it but can't say I hated it either.

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