Parents' Guide to The Machinist

What lingers most in this film by Brad Anderson is the dread and the color palette; it's a movie that feels like a soul stuck in limbo. The Machinist is draining to watch, deliberately so, and it was probably the first time Christian Bale became the actor willing to do anything for a role, up to and including starving himself down to a skeletal frame. That commitment is the film's most famous quality, and also its biggest liability: the performance calls so much attention to itself that it doesn't always live inside the character's emotions. There's a famous anecdote from the set of Marathon Man, where Laurence Olivier reportedly told Dustin Hoffman to just act instead of putting himself through extreme physical changes for the role, and decades later, that's the feeling this film leaves behind. What once seemed necessary to the character now reads as more of a stunt.

The industrial setting has a Cronenberg-ian coldness to it, a world without souls, and at the time, the film's twist worked as well as any of the genre's twist-driven thrillers. Time hasn't been as kind to it since; other films have pulled off similar reveals with more finesse, and there are simply better movies about insomnia, both versions of Insomnia, the Norwegian original and Christopher Nolan's remake, chief among them. The Machinist has real atmosphere and good performances, but it's very much a movie of its specific early-2000s moment rather than a genuine classic.