Trevor has a life outside of work, spent with pleasant blonde prostitute Stevie (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and attractive airport diner waitress Marie (Aitana Sánchez-Gijón). The latter has a preteenaged son Nicolas (Matthew Romero Moore). Trevor's landlady is Anna Massey.
One day a new worker, Ivan (John Sharian), shows up at the factory. Ivan distracts Trevor, which leads to an accident that amputates Miller's left arm. Trevor learns that no one can see Ivan but him. Because Trevor is stupid, he ignores this useful piece of information. Oddly, he isn't fired, either. Though later on he finally is, once his paranoia takes over. Soon he loses his girlfriend as well, and Marie has turned into an unattractive middle-aged woman. Go figure.
Anyway, there are a whole bunch of rotting fish heads in Trevor's refrigerator. No wonder he has been losing weight. He also murders a man who doesn't exist, and plays hangman with himself.
How others will see it. The Machinist was a fairly low budget movie that made little impact in theaters. Its video release was vastly more successful, and today it has more than 200K user votes at imdb.com. The user ratings are very high despite a slight decline with advancing age of the viewer (8.0 under 18 to 7.5 over 45).
The movie was ignored by the Oscars and BAFTA but did receive attention from fantasy and European film festivals. Christian Bale's remarkable weight loss (supposedly he lost 70 pounds) drew scattered Best Actor nods.
This is a depressing movie. People like it, though, because they believe Trevor deserves what happens to him. After all, he was careless while driving. That and extremely bad luck makes you a child murderer.
How I felt about it. Cinema's Imaginary People Syndrome kicked into high gear with Fight Club, and the Best Picture Oscar for A Beautiful Mind enshrined the concept. But it can be overdone, as is the case for the present downbeat film.
We know that Ivan exists only in the mind of our trouble protagonist. But what does he represent? Ivan could be a grown-up version of Nicolas, presumably the child that Trevor ran over. That would be more interesting, but doesn't appear to be the case.
Ivan is definitely an alter ego for Trevor. Does he represent Trevor's guilt? Nope. Is he Trevor's tormentor? Definitely. But why would he cause Trevor to cut off Miller's arm? What did Miller ever do? Why would Ivan cause Trevor to drive recklessly, possibly causing another road tragedy involving an innocent?
Ivan's character only makes sense if it is a manifestation of the Devil, who is using the rather stupid Trevor for his own malevolent purposes. But such a storyline gives the film more credit than it is due. It isn't clear what the director intended, other than to mess with our heads and resolve things with a clear ending. He wanted to wreck Trevor's life because of his hit and run, which in any event was a negligent accident, no more than what Laura Bush did as a teenager, and Mitt Romney did as a young adult.
As for Ivan's car. Would Trevor not be able to recognize it as his own? Would he really allow himself to be run over by a different car to track down the license plate? Why on Earth would Trevor take Nicolas on an arcade ride named Route 666? What do fish heads have to do with Trevor's hit and run?
It is difficult enough that a woman, even a depressed prostitute, would regard the emaciated and stressed-out Trevor as her future husband. It is impossible to believe that Marie and Nicolas, even as fantasy creations of Trevor's mind, would show such kindness to him after what he did to Nicolas.
In a sense, this is a Production Code movie. Trevor can't get away with his hit and run accident. Guilt causes him to lose his health, sanity, job, girlfriend, and freedom. The moral: Turn yourself in. You can't get away with it. The problem with that moral is that you're better off if you can get away it. Even Ralphie from The Christmas Story knows this, and he's only a child. Little wonder the Production Code was abandoned a half-century ago.