The Machinist (2004) dir. Brad Anderson
Starring: Christian Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Larry Gillard Jr. Michael Ironside, Aitana Sánchez-Gijón

**

By Alan Bacchus

Back in 2004, having been a huge fan of the underrated and little-seen horror flick, Session 9, I remember greatly anticipating this follow-up picture – a moody thriller about a hypochondriac suffering some kind of mental breakdown. Unfortunately, it never really manages to work entirely. Anderson tries his best to intrigue us with his expert abilities with mood and tone, but there’s just not enough going on to truly entertain us.

Christian Bale plays Trevor Reznick, a grossly underweight machine operator harbouring such internal hidden trauma he’s feared by just about everyone he comes in contact with. He enjoys spending time either with his favourite call girl, Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), or buying coffee from an airport diner waitress, Maria (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón).

Creepy things start happening to him, which fuels a deep-rooted paranoia that eventually comes to light. Reznick starts seeing mysterious post-it notes placed on his fridge, has nightmares of an amusement park ride called Route 666 and sees a creepy stranger wearing mirrored sunglasses, who appears to him at random. It's all randomness until the final act when the puzzle pieces are revealed to be fractured memories of a painful moment from the past, which his mind and body are desperately trying to forget.

One of the main talking points of the film was Christian Bale's dramatic weight loss. To the detriment of the film, his physique has an effect outside the context of the story. Bale is beyond weight loss, as his character is emaciated and malnourished, an effect of his deep psychological trauma. It’s an overpowered device and a distraction from the film.

Like Bale’s body, the story has only a bare bones skeleton of a plot on which to hang. The central problem is that so much of the film occurs in Reznick’s head. The entire thing feels like a dupe to the audience – a single piece of information held back from the audience fuels the entire film.

And so, Anderson has only his genre skills to work with. He creeps us out as best as he can with some wonderful surrealist imagery, which would be used more effectively in a better film. The factory scenes feature long close-ups of the machinery grinding and churning out the molded metal. A number of these scenes build to a moment that we know is bound to happen - one of the workmen getting caught in the machinery. We do get that scene, and it’s a doozy. But to what end? A great scene wasted in a dull movie.

The ending, which neatly ties up all the randomness of Anderson’s imagery, feels like a cop-out, a matter of convenience revealing only an obvious manipulation of a single plot twist into an entire feature film.

The Machinist is available on Blu-ray from Paramount Pictures Home Entertainment.

Vanishing on 7th Street (2010) dir. Brad Anderson
Starring: Hayden Christensen, Thandie Newton, John Leguizamo, Jacob Latimore

**

By Alan Bacchus

The title of this picture has a very Twilight Zone feel to it. Perhaps it's by design. After all, the high concept at core here is clearly influenced by the seminal work of TZ writer Richard Matheson. It’s the I Am Legend/Last Man on Earth scenario recycled again. Some kind of unexplainable apocalyptic disaster results in a massive power outage, but not just electronics – the sun itself. There are no zombies or vampires in this case. Instead, it’s simply darkness itself representing the evil lurking and stalking the survivors.

The director, Brad Anderson, is the main attraction here. Genre-philes know him from his brilliant low-budget horror film Session 9. Unfortunately, his subsequent efforts, the moody, atmospheric mind-bender The Machinist and the Hitchcockian train-actioner Transsiberian were too faulty to match the promise of Session 9. Despite some minor tingling of the spine in the opening act, Vanishing on 7th Street is not a return to form.

It’s a terrific opening. Bone-chilling, actually. Hayden Christensen is a television news producer who is caught in a massive power outage. But when he searches out others in the building, he discovers everyone is gone – literally vanished, with their clothes on the floor the only remnants of their places on earth. We see the same thing happening through the eyes of Paul (John Leguizamo), an AMC Cinema projectionist. The imagery of the clothing left on the floor outlining the vanished bodies is stunning.

Where did they go? What happened to them? We don’t know exactly, but some kind of evil force in the shadows creeps up and steals their bodies and souls. Much like The Fog encroaching on the villages of John Carpenter’s seaside town, the shadows on 7th street are eerie and scary supernatural entities.

Brad Anderson shoots these scenes with great precision, using a slow and purposeful pace to amplify every moment of suspense. But after this set-up with the four main characters congregating together, the second act stalls. Unlike Night of the Living Dead or 28 Days Later or even Shaun of the Dead, the foursome, which also includes a young boy and a hysterical mother who has just lost her child, is hopelessly dull and uninteresting. As customary, the group tries to piece together what’s happening in the rest of the world, hypothesizing about what kind of apocalypse they’re in, and specifically, how to get to some kind of safe haven located in Chicago. Unfortunately, the group is too passive, and without this forward momentum the film runs out of gas quickly.

Thandie Newton, who plays the crying and inconsolable grieving mother, is like fingernails on a chalkboard and plainly looks lost in this kind of genre film. Hayden Christensen does a decent job portraying Luke as a twitchy, reluctant leader. John Leguizamo’s back in this kind of role – remember his turn as the obsessed parent in the similarly-themed Shyamalan film The Happening? He’s crippled with an injury for most of the film, which is an unfortunate and unintentional metaphor for the staleness of the film’s second and third acts.

Brad Anderson does the best job he can, creating a unique and unsettling atmosphere. But like The Machinist, with very little script or characters to work with, his tonal aspirations amount to just another forgettable horror film.

Vanishing on 7th Street is available on Blu-ray and DVD from EOne Entertainment in Canada.