The Jacket

Ratings: 8.2/10

Film Class: C+

Genre: Suspense

This movie must have been inspired by The Butterfly Effect, since the former came out a year before this movie did. However, comparing both of them, though The Butterfly Effect was almost "legend", The Jacket didn't come in too far off either.

A Gulf War veteran who supposedly died miraculously survived a gunshot to his head. However, a murder incident of a patrol cop puts him as the prime suspect and failing to remember anything of the incident, the court decides to send him to a mental instituition for the criminally insane. Tied to a strait jacket and forcefully "imprisoned" in a morgue drawer as a form of his rehabilitation, he experiences a warped reality which will change his life and the lives of those around him forever.

The first impression this movie gave me was that it was a pyschotic horror film, well, I can't help but not think that because of the poster and the weird movie title. I had initially thought the jacket to be some sort of an animal, my bad, should be the jackal, but it stayed with me all these years and steered me away from this movie. After finally setting my mind to catch it, all I can say that it was one of the best decisions I've made about watching a film.

This movie really has more susbtance than it looks, and it deserves much more recognition than it has. Adrian Brody was sublime in his performance and Keira Knightley added a little bit of "sunshine" to this dark film. Daniel Craig did good whatever screentime he was granted as the only friend Adrian Brody has in the asylum.

I was pleasantly blown away with the development of the story and I honestly didn't "see it coming". The opening sequence gave us a short insight into the protagonist's background, and created a gradual build up of a spiralling trail of suspense with all the experiments and what Adrian Brody was experiencing. Fact or Fiction? You decide. Then it eventually veered off a different path from what you would expect and delivered a highly memorable closure.

Truly an unsung hero of its genre, and like how I've always put it, a hidden gem of filmology.