“Jacob’s Ladder” is not a pleasant movie. It isn’t a satisfying movie, or a clean movie, or a movie that will make you feel good. It’s a nightmarish, messy examination of mental illness, theology and the horrors of war. This movie could have been directed by the grisly Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch if it were made 500 years ago.
Jacob Singer is a veteran who can’t hold on to reality for more than a ten minute stretch. In Vietnam, his fellow soldiers scream, convulse and lose their minds in the midst of a bloody ambush. In New York, he’s haunted by disfigured strangers, strange deaths and surreal hospitals. At his home before the war, he languishes with his children and beautiful wife.
Singer can’t decide which of experiences are real. Each scene of the movie goes slowly wrong before ending in terror and disaster. He leapfrogs in and out of memories and hallucination. Each time he sleeps or wakes, he’s in a different time and a different place, comfortable and sane for a few minutes, before sliding back into horrible unreality.
“Jacob’s Ladder” provokes relentlessly. Director Adrian Lyne hammers the viewer with a litany of possible explanations–Drug use? PTSD? Purgatory? Government experiments?–but fails to give any coherent structure or thread. Despite this bombastic energy, the movie fails to be the taut, labyrinthine thriller to which it aspires. There’s simply too much going on. The viewer, seeped in the chaotic plot, realizes Singer’s overwhelming confusion and helplessness: and the movie, in its disorganization and nonsensical terror, imitates the mental breakdown that it depicts.
Visually, however, “Jacob’s Ladder” is a tour de force. The demons that haunt Singer: an elderly nurse with teeth growing from the top of her head, a blanket-covered hobo with a slithering tentacle, a doctor without eyes: sneak into the edges and ends of scenes before working their way into the center. There are no computer graphics in this movie. Every monster on screen is a concrete, prosthetic monstrosity. They are unnervingly visceral; like the movie in which they populate, they might not be pretty, but they’re effective.
