“The Machinist” follows Trevor Resnick, a factory worker who throughout the film is fighting to decipher what is real and what is not. Trevor’s ever loosening grip on reality causes a stark decline in his quality of life and serves as the driving force of the films plot. “The Machinist” does feature multiple supporting characters but they serve as little else than reactionaries to Trevor’s increasingly erratic and aggressive behavior. This is a film about a man battling with a mental disorder, the rising tension between Trevor and his reality is the crux of the film rather than just a side attraction of a larger main story. Without Trevor’s slipping mental state “The Machinist” would simply be a film about a man who works in a factory and leads
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In this scene Trevor looks tired and his appearance is skeletal in nature, Stevie even makes a comment on his weight, saying if there was any less of him he would not exist. The point is that the film does not tip toe around the fact that Trevor is suffering from mental illness. From his sickly appearance to the opening scene of the film involving the protagonist in a crime the director wants the viewer to know that he is unwell, even if the reasons behind his illness are withheld until the final minutes of screen time. By the end of the story the viewer has been shown the cause of Trevor’s mental decline. Approximately a year prior to the events of the movie Trevor was involved in a hit and run in which he killed a young boy. Before this point anyone watching the movie would have begun to piece together the facts that Trevor has been having both auditory and visual hallucinations of some of the characters like, Ivan, Maria and Nikolas and that his persecutory delusions stem from the character Ivan that Trevor is imagining throughout the entire film. Nonetheless this flashback scene connects many of the smaller plot devices and objects of interest that the director of the movie highlights throughout and also serves as the basis of the DSM-5 diagnosis that I am giving
In this scene Trevor looks tired and his appearance is skeletal in nature, Stevie even makes a comment on his weight, saying if there was any less of him he would not exist. The point is that the film does not tip toe around the fact that Trevor is suffering from mental illness. From his sickly appearance to the opening scene of the film involving the protagonist in a crime the director wants the viewer to know that he is unwell, even if the reasons behind his illness are withheld until the final minutes of screen time. By the end of the story the viewer has been shown the cause of Trevor’s mental decline. Approximately a year prior to the events of the movie Trevor was involved in a hit and run in which he killed a young boy. Before this point anyone watching the movie would have begun to piece together the facts that Trevor has been having both auditory and visual hallucinations of some of the characters like, Ivan, Maria and Nikolas and that his persecutory delusions stem from the character Ivan that Trevor is imagining throughout the entire film. Nonetheless this flashback scene connects many of the smaller plot devices and objects of interest that the director of the movie highlights throughout and also serves as the basis of the DSM-5 diagnosis that I am giving