The Jacket

Gulf war veterans, paranoid delusions, multiple realities, possible time-travel - if The Jacket comes on like a remake of Jacob's Ladder spliced with The Manchurian Candidate and Donnie Darko, that's only because you haven't heard the bit about One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A superbly scripted psychological thriller, The Jacket concerns itself with Jack Starks (Brody), a war veteran who finds himself accused of a murder he can't explain due to the amnesia caused by a stray bullet he caught in Kuwait. Sentenced to a prison for the mentally insane, he comes under the beady eye of Dr Becker (Kristofferson), who believes the best way to treat such cases is to lock them into morgue drawers and let them sweat it out. A cruel enough treatment in itself, but doubly so for Starks, who shoots forward in time to 2007, there to discover he has been murdered in the past (so to speak). Director Maybury and cinematographer Peter Deming display a flair for inventive visual trickery, sustaining the narrative at a full-on pace that manages to side-step any possible holes in the script, while Brody is totally believable as a man struggling to make sense of a unique and terrifying predicament.