TREVOR Reznik has not slept for a year, and Christian Bale has not eaten a la carte for a very long time to play this cadaverous, friendless lathe worker at an industrial plant.

Reznik's first act is to drop a corpse in the harbour waters in a carpet coffin, before seeking solace but no biscuits from his sympathetic neighbour, a hooker.

He is not the man to ask how he got to this point, because he is blighted by confusion, paranoia, guilt, anxiety and terror, and like Guy Pearce in Memento he must work his way through a series of clues to find the root cause of his mysterious affliction.

At least he can have a wry laugh at his predicament: "No one ever died of insomnia," he observes, reaching for Dostoevsky's The Idiot for some light reading material.

"One day I had this image of a sleepless, intensely private individual trapped in his own personal hell," says screenwriter Scott Korsar. Whereupon he and director Brad Anderson construct a meditation on identity and loss in a time-honoured storyline where "a man goes out on a quest to solve a troubling mystery that ultimately leads right back to himself".

Body gaunt, nerves shot, and seemingly turning into a ghost, Bale's Reznik tries to stick to routine to stay alive. He keeps company to a minimum, seeing only Jennifer Jason Leigh's whore and Aitana Sanchez-Gijon's airport waitress in a regular rotation that stretches to his methodical work practices. That way, he reasons, he can remain sane, but then he notices a new face at the plant, Ivan (John Sharian), who may well not exist.

Reznik is so distracted he causes an industrial accident and is shown the door, and at this point his solitary journey into insanity turns all the weirder.

What ensues is the stuff of Kafka, David Lynch, Polanski and Kubrick, but Anderson makes his own mark on the overcrowded world of the psychological thriller through a combination of stark lighting, screen colours devoid of all brightness and a superb sense of dislocation. The setting is presumably American but it has the feel of pre-Glasnost Eastern European and is, in reality, Spain.

Beyond such detail is the film's most distinctive feature of all: the emaciated Christian Bale giving a performance that is so extreme and morbid it goes beyond method acting into altogether darker territory. His Batman should be fascinating.

Updated: 15:58 Thursday, April 07, 2005