The Machinist

The Machinist I thought was quite a unique film, looking at Art direction within the movie the first thing I noticed were the colours of every scene and shot. The film has a dull effect to it, but not in a bad way in a more unique way, something in which I haven’t seen before. It used very few colours like just green, grey, blue and the odd yellow tints along with black and white for negative and positive areas. It’s kind of odd though, and what I mean by that is that last week we looked at how we can create images with a small colour palette and this movie seems to have been created with a limited colour palette to. For some of the scenes, even when outside in the open looked dull even though you could tell it was a bright sunny day.

One particular scene I recall is the route 666 one, very gloomy dark atmosphere in which the route was portraying Trevor’s (main character) actual incident with a hit a run murder of a small child (Nicholas) in example the route 666 is filled with red lighting indicating Trevor not stopping at a red light on route 66 while driving, in which is the start of his insomnia and starvation. At the start of the film it sort of makes you wonder why this guy is the way he is, being so skinny, not sleeping and it makes you want to watch on. Strange things start happening to Trevor like meeting a guy called Ivan who nobody knows off, yet he works for the same company as Trevor in which eventually Trevor starts to believe he is the one that killed Nicholas as he keeps popping everywhere, like in a red sports car in which Trevor follows him and take the registration number in an attempt to track Ivan down he finds that the car belonged to himself but was destroyed a year ago. It adds horror to the film as it goes on and all these strange things keep happening, especially the notes that keep popping up in the form of a hangman game. Trevor sort of hallucinates a lot I feel, but it’s these hallucinations that are trying to tell him that he murdered the child and it’s sort of a way of attacking him as he can’t face the truth and reality of it because of what it’s done to him.

Coming back to the route 666 scene however I like how they made everything in that scene relate to everything Trevor has done and Nicholas also with Trevor indicates has a seizure while holding an ice cream which portrays how he was killed while holding an ice cream when he was hit by the car. Eventually at the end of the movie we see what Trevor should of done by helping instead of running away, there was one part I distinctly remember in this scene were there’s two options of turning on the carnival ride, Trevor tells Nicholas to go right but instead goes left to ‘hell’, in which shows Trevor knows he has done wrong. At the very end Trevor completes the hangman notes that pop up throughout spelling: Killer, despite his other attempts of mother, being mother’s day early on in the film and then: ‘Miller’ which is a guy who lost his arm due to an accident that Trevor caused at work.

The dull looking Art style is made to use in this film as it suits the story line. The lighting and colours suit what Trevor is going through since his accident a year earlier, as everyone tries to avoid him because of his appearance and paranoia, his sleeplessness because of all this, they way he thinks this Ivan is a murderer and trying to attack him, but in actual fact it’s a reflection of himself and it’s not until the end we see that the car Trevor saw was himself and faces the reality and turns himself into the police, though he finally sleeps for the first time in a year after all that.

The film sort of reminds me of Memento which we saw a year ago, which the sticky notes and trying to remember things and it all doesn’t make sense until the end until you work out what has been going on and the order of things that are happening and why they happened. The Art direction in that film too reminds me of this.