An unbelievably emaciated Christian Bale plays the title character in this drama about an insomniac who's a little out-of-sorts. Okay, a lot out-of-sorts. When I was working at the FamVid, lots of my coworkers liked the movie, but all of them complained about how skinny Bale is and I kind of just dismissed it. The movie itself fell into the "rented it from the 2-for-1 section a bunch of times but never watched" category - sadly, a category with a lot of entries. It's true, though: Bale is so skinny that it's gross. When he's shirtless (and, God forbid, flexing) and you can see all the ribs and the upper vertebrae, and all kinds of other bone things and protrusions.
I'll say one thing right off the bat: I did not understand this movie at all. And by that, I don't mean that I couldn't follow it (though it was, at times, a bit Lynchian), but rather that I just didn't get the "Why?" Even when the movie was "cleared up", I didn't get a sense of completion. Overwhelmingly, I found that I didn't really care. I cared that I knew how it ended and what the filmmakers were actually going for, but that didn't really reach far enough toward me. This is a fault of the story itself, not of the acting, as Bale, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon are great.
This movie also suffers from the trap of thinking that sometimes showing the near-ending at the beginning is a good thing. Here, it does absolutely nothing. Also, the ending itself was a real "okay, fine" moment. Of course, since I stopped really caring long before then what was really going on, it didn't really hit me that hard. And come on, who didn't absolutely know that the first letter was going to be a "K"? DUH.
Score: 5/10
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