Jacob's Ladder (1990)

One Sunday morning, I experienced the most terrifying and devastating nightmare my mind had ever conjured in my 27 years of existence. From what I can remember, I got into a car accident—which plays into my insecurity of driving—and died. At first, I hadn't yet realized that I was dead. I suddenly found myself in my house, listening to my father reminisce wistfully for the umpteenth time to my mother about a childhood photo in which he and I, as a baby, laid beside one another in bed, me staring into his eyes with a smile. 

At some point, it dawned on me that he wasn't just rehashing a memory for the nostalgia of it; he was reminiscing about me as a baby because those memories are now all that he and my mom had left. All at once—like Malcolm Crowe in the ending of The Sixth Sense—a wave of devastating realization washed over me: I died in that crash, so now, I'll never even have the opportunity to get married or gift my parents a grandchild. Worse than that, I'm now trapped in a purgatorial existence where I'm forced to watch my parents suffer. Like a fly on the wall, I can see them, but they can't see me, and I get to witness them live out the remainder of their lives, fully aware that they will do so in a permanent state of grief, haunted by the fact that they outlived their only son. 

All they can do now is talk about me and the memories we created as a family, because that's all I am: a memory. And I can't touch them, hug them, sit with them on the sofa, lie between them in their bed, tell them how much I love them. All I can do is watch them suffer. Like the worst nightmares, despite the supernaturalism, it felt completely real. I woke up, and although the nightmare was short in length, it was just long enough to pack a gargantuan wallop. After my parents left to do their customary Sunday shopping later that morning, I took the opportunity to verbalize the fragments that I could recall from the nightmare, and broke down in tears as I did so. This nightmare was as close to Hell as I've ever felt, like a literal trip to the bowels thereof. 

Horror films possess the uncanny ability to tap into the deepest recesses of our subconscious and shine a light on our most profound fears. Some may cause nightmares, but few evoke the surreal, disorienting, horrifying sensation of a nightmare with the level of heart-wrenching potency attained by Jacob's Ladder, a psychological horror mind fuck that transports us directly into the subconscious of a dying Vietnam soldier who uses every remaining ounce of inner strength to hold onto the preciousness of life until the time comes to accept that, in the words of Jud Crandall from Pet Sematary, "Sometimes, dead is better."

On October 6, 1971, American infantryman Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins) is with the 1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, when all of a sudden, his unit comes under attack. This opening segment is one of the most chaotic and visually incoherent in the history of horror, but perhaps not without purpose. Jacob and his platoon lounge around the field, the men cracking jokes about Jacob's constant bowel evacuations, Jacob making fun of the size of one of his men's penis. The atmosphere of stillness and silliness is suddenly obliterated by gunshots firing from random directions. While many of Jacob's comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior, collapsing, convulsing, vomiting blood. Jacob escapes into the jungle, where he's ambushed and stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet, the identity of his attacker strategically concealed from the frame. As he slowly collapses, a look of shock and confusion manifests on Jacob's face.

Four years later, Jacob awakens on the New York City Subway, having seemingly made a full recovery. Now a postal worker, he lives in a Brooklyn apartment with his girlfriend and co-worker, Jezebel Pipkin (Elizabeth Peña), with whom he shares a passionate relationship. However, Jacob still reminisces wistfully about his family; he's divorced from his wife, Sarah (Patricia Kalember), and forever haunted by the death of his youngest son, Caleb (Macaulay Culkin, in a strikingly adorable, loving, and mature pre-Home Alone performance), who was run over by a truck. 

Potentially owing to a combination of his grief and near-death experience on the battlefield, Jacob finds himself terrorized by recurring visions of faceless, vibrating male figures and a tentacled creature, as well as followed by a car full of mysterious black-suited men. Initially, he dismisses these visions as hallucinations born from a war-wear mind, but something more conspiratorial seems to be afoot. When Jacob goes to a local VA hospital to see his regular doctor, Carlson, he's rudely informed by the receptionist that they have no record of him ever having been a patient there and that Dr. Carlson was killed in a car explosion about a month prior.

Paul Gruneger (Pruitt Taylor Vince), one of Jacob's former platoon mates, contacts him via phone and demands to meet up at a bar, where he frantically confesses to experiencing the same hallucinations, terrified that a horde of demons is coming after him to drag him to Hell. On their way out of the bar, Paul is killed in a car explosion. At his funeral, Jacob congregates with the other surviving members of his platoon and divulges Paul's confession, learning that they too have been plagued by demonic hallucinations. As Jacob struggles to distinguish nightmares and hallucinations from reality and maintain a fragile grip on his gradually eroding sanity, he comes to believe that the Army performed some kind of military experiment on him and his platoon without their knowledge or consent.

Bruce Joel Rubin, who began crafting the screenplay in 1980 based on a nightmare in which he found himself trapped in a New York City Subway station, blends nightmarish imagery and a dream-logic narrative with an unambiguous anti-war polemic to intriguing, bizarre, disorienting, disturbing, and ultimately gut-wrenching effect. Jacob's Ladder truly plays out like a nightmare, specifically a nightmare within a nightmare within a dying mind that has yet to let go of its connection to the world of the living. The way that Rubin, director Adrian Lyne, and editor Tom Rolf balance their ambitiously layered story isn't entirely seamless; Rolf cuts back and forth, seemingly without rhyme or reason, between Jacob living with Jezzie and still married to and living with Sarah and their three sons, Caleb, Jed (Bryan Larkin), and Eli (B.J. Donaldson). Muddying the waters further are sporadic inserts of a wounded Jacob being escorted by helicopter and treated after his stabbing in Vietnam. Lyne and Rubin blur the line between past and present so aggressively and choppily that it's difficult to ascertain what time period we're in, what's real, and what's the deceptive product of a grief-stricken psyche. 

The message that Rubin wants to convey, however, is loud and clear: the U.S. Government prioritizes the savagery and efficiency of its male soldiers over their wellbeing. While the soldiers are selflessly willing to sacrifice their lives for their country, the Army values them as nothing more than commodities, seeking to dehumanize them into ferocious killing machines capable of defeating their non-American enemies at any cost necessary. They couldn't care less if their methods backfire and cost the soldiers their lives, and will cover up every trace of their wrongdoing to save themselves. As for the men who left their families behind to serve their oh-so beautiful country, fuck them. They can either die a gruesome and agonizing death on the battlefield or return home and rot mentally from the inside out. They're expendable guinea pigs. 

Rubin relays his pessimistic perspective through a prolonged, expository confession by a chemist named Michael Newman (Matt Craven), the archetypal exposition deliverer manufactured solely to explain the mystery behind Jacob's psychological dilemma. Like the best actors tasked with this thankless cliché of a role—Patricia Belcher in Jeepers Creepers, Lin Shaye in Insidious, J.K. Simmons in Dark Skies—Craven delivers his monologue with passion and deep remorse, making Michael an outlier from the rest of the reckless, indifferent, self-involved Army from which he sprung. Unlike those faceless entities, he has a conscience and clearly delineated motivation. 

Even though Jacob's Ladder transpires primarily within its protagonist's unreliable, tortured psyche— thus granting Rubin the freedom to take his odyssey in just about any unpredictable, irrational direction he can dream of—that doesn't entirely absolve him of leaving behind some gaping logic gaps in his story. When a car nearly runs Jacob over in the street, no bystander is present to witness the deliberate attack. Afterward, Jacob doesn't think to go to the nearest police station and file a report. A strange man—later revealed as Michael Newman—materializes out of thin air to warn Jacob of the approaching vehicle then disappears without a trace. Newman later reappears to drag Jacob away from a car explosion, and after he serves his purpose, he runs away. He's always present when Jacob's life is in jeopardy, particularly involving cars. So in addition to explaining the meaning behind the movie's title, Newman's secondary purpose is to be Jacob's perpetual life saver. 

One morning, Jacob pushes Jezzie to the floor, hallucinating that she's possessed, and by their next interaction, she's already forgiven him without so much as an apology on his end. It's never explained why Mr. Geary (Jason Alexander), a lawyer who initially agrees to take Jacob's unit's case of military corruption, is so convinced that they never served in combat in Vietnam and were issued psychological discharges, despite Jacob's earnest insistence to the contrary. When Jacob shoves Geary into a wall, you almost want to pump your fist in the air and cheer. After Jacob fights off and escapes from a carload of mysterious suited men who threaten him into keeping his mouth shut about the military, the men leave him alive, albeit with a damaged back, in the street. Why wouldn't they carry him back into their car and kill him?

The most brilliantly gut-wrenching scene in Jacob's Ladder is when, after losing consciousness in an ice bath intended to bring down a deadly fever, Jacob awakens in a bed in the middle of the night beside Sarah. Apparently, his entire existence with Jezebel was a dream, or as he now views it, a nightmare. Suddenly, Gabe wanders into their bedroom, having never died, and asks his dad to tuck him in, to which he happily obliges. Also sleeping in Gabe's bedroom, in an adjacent bunk bed, are his older brothers, Eli and Jed, who wake up and tell their father they love him. In this one interlude, Rubin paints a clear, concise, moving picture of a tight-knit family, immersing us in Jacob's euphoric relief. Sarah never kicked him out of their home, Gabe was never hit by a truck. It was all one, long-seeming, vicious nightmare—and then Jacob reawakens in the tub of ice, realizing his "return" to his previous life was the actual, sadistic dream. You know that feeling when you have a beautiful dream that fulfills your deepest desires and, despite its blatant absurdity, it feels completely real, then your eyes open and you're staring at the ceiling, and the return to your everyday reality punches you square in the solar plexus? Lyne and Rubin evoke that sensation with masterful manipulation.

Cinematographer Jeffrey L. Kimball uses light to symbolize emotional acceptance and peace with the irrevocable nature of fate. As Jacob makes his way to his family's apartment for the final stage of his odyssey, it's nighttime. Kimball films the taxi-drive home with a dark blue filter, a cloud of fog blowing gloomily across the street. While sitting in his living room, having inwardly reached a complete state of acceptance, the night spontaneously transforms into daytime, streaks of sunlight shining through the window. Waiting patiently for him on the staircase is Gabe. Jacob breaks down into his son's arms, and Gabe whisperingly assures him, "It's OK." Father and son reunited now and for all of eternity, Jacob takes Gabe's hand and follows him upstairs into a rapidly growing flash of yellow light, symbolizing their entrance into Heaven. 

Jacob's Ladder boasts the second most tearfully moving ending that I've ever seen in a horror film—its poignancy augmented by a slow, mournful piano theme composed by Maurice Jarre—directly behind that of The Sixth Sense, in which Malcolm, realizing he's been a ghost this whole time, whisperingly professes his love for his wife, Anna, as she sleeps. Like Shyamalan's indescribably romantic and melancholy ending, the resolution of Jacob's Ladder has me bawling my eyes out every time I watch it, and possesses the bonus power to make my eyes tear up just by replaying it in my mind, including right now as I write about it. Most importantly, it brings Jacob's odyssey to a tragic and shattering yet emotionally satisfying and spiritually uplifting and inevitable conclusion, all while tying into a monologue by Jacob's chiropractor confidant, Louie Denardo (Danny Aiello), about the acceptance of fate. 

Kimball uses a somber color palette of grays to paint an unflattering portrait of Brooklyn, New York: the sky is perpetually overcast, the streets are submerged in puddles and trash, making the town look decrepit, impoverished, and depressing—a poetic visualization of Jacob's melancholy, grief, and lack of fulfillment. A cloud of cigarette smoke from Jezzie all but envelops their rundown apartment. 

Utilizing in-camera effects as opposed to CGI, Kimball and Rubin craft some of the most distinctly nightmarish imagery ever committed to celluloid, particularly a clan of inhuman, faceless men with vibrating heads who taunt Jacob throughout. To achieve this special practical horror effect, Lyne—inspired by the art of painter Francis Bacon—recorded unknown actors shaking their heads back and forth at a low frame rate, resulting in disturbingly fast motion when played back. Smartly, Lyne refrains from diminishing the horror of his demonic creations through overexposure, depicting them in glimpses from Jacob's point of view to bring his sanity and reliability as a narrator into question. Typically, these faceless, vibrating figures appear to Jacob from inside a moving vehicle; in their introduction in the subway station, one of them stares at Jacob through the back window of a train and waves, as if to say, "We'll be seeing you soon" or "Come join us."

Demonic imagery abounds throughout Jacob's Ladder: a tentacle slithers inside a sleeping homeless passenger's raggedy clothing, a devilish horn protrudes from the head of a hospital receptionist. In the most hard-to-watch sequence set on a dance floor, the light flickers to nearly epileptic effect as editor Rolf cuts back and forth between close-ups of Jacob's increasingly terrified face and of Jezzie dancing provocatively as a tentacle wraps around her legs and protrudes from her mouth. As an injured Jacob is wheeled on a gurney into an asylum-like hospital, Kimball uses a rapid-moving POV shot to depict a hellish torture chamber populated by circus-looking freaks, including a four-legged man who crawls across a see-through floor above him. The floor below is slathered in blood and severed limbs. In scenes that either transpire in the present or past, of Jacob being carted off on a helicopter, Kimball's camera looks up at the trees partially shielding a sepia-toned sky.

Editor Rolf inserts home-video-style flashbacks of Jacob in his previous, happier life with his family: carrying Gabe upside down, all three of his sons wrapping themselves in a brotherly embrace, scored to the rhythmic thump of a heartbeat. In presenting the defining tragedy of Jacob's life, Rolf cuts back and forth between Jacob sitting in reflection and Gabe wheeling his bicycle into the street. As Jacob sinks further into the memory, forcing himself to confront it rather than suppress it any longer, Rolf dispenses the details in dreadful fragments: first, a stack of baseball cards spills out onto the street, then the large tire of a truck collides into the bike with a jarring screech. No body or blood is shown, but the shot and sound are soul-sickening enough in their tactful implication. 

As Jacob and Paul leave the bar and head for Paul's car, Jacob sees a dime in the street. "My lucky day," he says, with no idea how lucky he's about to be. He bends down to pick it up, Rolf cuts to a close-up of Paul inserting his key into his ignition. Naturally, you expect the next shot to be of his car exploding, but Rolf draws out the inevitable moment with a Hitchcockian level of anticipatory dread. The dime gets sucked back before Jacob can snatch it. Jacob looks at Paul, an expression of dread instantly flooding his face. Paul meets his gaze, and his lips part into a slight, enigmatic, almost peaceful smile, as though he knows what's about to happen and is content with it. He feels ready to go because it will provide a release from a reality that's far more torturous. Finally, the car explodes.

For a psychologically driven, nightmarish odyssey like Jacob's Ladder to succeed as a genuinely terrifying and gripping horror film, it's crucial that the director center their hallucinogenic visuals and nightmare-logic storyline around a mesmerizing protagonist. Otherwise, all they have is a phantasmagoria of surreal visuals without a flesh-and-blood character to tether them to. When it comes to horror, a sensation of fear can only germinate from the fear we feel for the character being terrorized. To achieve this, one must hire the perfect lead with the commitment and conviction to bring a degree of realism to the decidedly unreal. Tim Robbins is that very lead. 

As Jacob Singer, an Everyman terrorized by both the real-world horrors of combat and the loss of his youngest child and the otherworldly horrors of grotesque hallucinations, Robbins grounds the surrealism of Rubin's screenplay and Lyne's aesthetics in a sympathetic, soul-shattering, hauntingly human performance. He makes Jacob the perfect audience surrogate. We are taking this odyssey alongside him. Everything he sees, we see. Every emotion that passes through him exits the screen and implants itself deeply into our stomachs. We receive every clue and learn every answer to the puzzle at the precise moment he does. The hallucinogenic visuals are only as terrifying as they are because of how authentically Robbins reacts to them. Had he not, they would've fallen flat.

He plays Jacob as an ordinary family man thrust into a distorted, nightmarish perversion of reality, acting prominently with the power of his achingly expressive face. His eyes, often pink and bulging out of their sockets in incomprehensible fright, convey distress, shock, disorientation, and heartache. After reawakening in his ice bath to his undesirable "current" reality, a single longing tear swims away from each eye and down his temples. He buries his pained face in his hands and delivers his lines in a melancholic whisper, seemingly aware how insane he sounds when recounting an ordeal. 

As a pair of lovers, Robbins and his screen partner, Elizabeth Peña, exhibit electric chemistry; in her own right, Peña is on equal footing with Robbins, playing Jezebel as a woman of the utmost nuance and sex appeal. In some ways, she's as sympathetic a character as Jacob. Upon first glance, Jezzie comes across as inconsiderate and cold, as though only involved with Jacob for the sex: she refuses to remember the names of Jacob's three sons, then when reminded, she insults them for their biblical origins ("Where do you think Jezebel comes from?" Jacob points out); she insults Sarah's picture, claiming that she looks like a bitch (look who's talking), then after seeing Jacob break down at a photo of Gabe, disposes his family photos in the incinerator. 

In a lesser screenplay—or in the hands of a lesser actress—Jezzie would've been written off as a one-dimensional shrew; as thoughtfully realized by Rubin and Peña, she's a goodhearted woman with a misguided understanding of how to help others process grief. In one brief but telling scene at Paul's funeral, Jezzie urges his widow not to cry, insisting that "You need to be strong for your children." She's someone who believes that crying equates to weakness. Peña conveys that her intentions are never less than pure and benevolent. Jezzie doesn't burn Jacob's family photos out of spite; she just hates seeing him cry, she hates the pain these memories stir up within him. She wants him to leave his tragic past behind and ground himself in the present with her. However, her actions can be thoughtlessly abrasive, as when she casually refers to Gabe as "the dead one" and chuckles while telling Jacob that he was calling out the names of his sons in his sleep.

Peña brings empathy to Jezzie's frustration. She wants to live a normal, happy life with Jacob, and she's willing to afford him a degree of patience and understanding, but her tolerance can only stretch so far. As she reminds him, she has a life to live too. Jezzie expresses mortification at Jacob for fainting on the dance floor and screaming in front of her Heathen friends, threatening to leave him if he's truly going insane. "If you go crazy, Jake, you're going crazy on your own." She's not a bad person, she just didn't sign up to become someone's caretaker. She wants a boyfriend, not a patient. 

Ironically enough, it's within that very scene—in which she utters that warning—where Jezzie emphatically demonstrates the caring woman she is deep down inside. After taking Jacob's temperature to see he has a 106-degree fever, she flies into a panic, calling a doctor, who assures her Jacob would die on his way to the hospital. Transitioning into nurturer mode, Jezzie carries Jacob out of bed and into the bathroom, where she undresses him and fills their tub with every last ice cube in their freezer. Realizing it's not enough, she frantically begs her neighbors for help, and they bring their own ice and assist Jezzie in carrying Jacob into the tub. When Jacob goes to sleep, she plants a motherly kiss on his forehead. After two weeks of serving as the caretaker she swore she'd never become, Jezzie graciously makes him sandwiches and encourages him to get out of the apartment and go for a walk or see a movie. "One of us should be having fun," she says, her soft, composed voice just barely belying her simmering resentment. 

As Jacob's one true confidant, Danny Aiello provides a beacon of unconditional, nonjudgmental compassion and support. In the scene where Louie barges into the hospital screamingly demanding the whereabouts of his patient and friend, Aiello is commanding, his no-nonsense anger so intimidating it verges on homicidal. He delivers a fascinating, thematically revealing monologue in which he quotes 14th-century Christian mystic Meister Eckhart: "If you're frightened of dying, and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It's just a matter of how you look at it, that's all." Based on a shot in which streaks of white light appear to project from Louie's back as he stands over Jacob, who tells him, "You know you look like an angel, Louie? Like an overgrown cherub," it's possible that he in fact is one. 

Jacob's Ladder is the furthest thing from a conventional horror film. In the end, it doesn't contain any true villains. On the surface, the faceless, head-shaking entities that torment Jacob are terrifying demons seeking to take him to Hell. As explained by Louie, that's just the way Jacob initially interprets them because he's not ready to embrace his fate and step into a new realm of being. Only then is he able to see them for what they really are: angels welcoming him into Heaven. The plot doesn't follow a logical sequence because nightmares never do. In most horror films, the protagonist is thrust into a battle for survival against an unstoppable foe and must summon every ounce of their strength, both physical and psychological, to defeat them, if only temporarily, and emerge triumphant. 

Jacob's Ladder subverts any such formula because, following the opening scene, Jacob has already died, and his journey is spiritual, much in the same way Malcolm Crowe's was. For Jacob, he only believes his goal is to outrun his "demons" and hold the Army that put him in this predicament in the first place accountable. In actuality, he has to accept that his time in the natural world has already come to an end. In order to find internal peace, he has to stop fighting, rather than persist. And what awaits on the other side, as argued by Rubin, can be far more beautiful and gratifying than anything in the material world.

Jacob's Ladder works on a number of levels: as a nightmarish descent into a man's purgatorial hell, a crushing family drama about a broken man learning to process his grief over his deceased son, a suspenseful governmental conspiracy mystery, a gruesome up-close dramatization of war, and a pointedly cynical polemic against the United States military behind it. Because Jacob's odyssey transpires entirely within the confines of his dying mind, Jacob's Ladder fits definitively in the subgenre of psychological horror, but thanks to its disturbing demonic imagery and spiritual resolution, it can also qualify as supernatural horror. 

But make no mistake, this is not a fun haunted-house fright fest or formulaic demonic-possession Exorcist rip-off, but something far more original, challenging, metaphysical, and existential. Jacob's Ladder is a fever dream in cinematic form, rich in important messages about the afterlife and how personal perception can shape our attitude toward, and acceptance of, mortality. If you can appreciate a beautifully crafted mind fuck that toys with your expectations without feeling the need to spoon-feed concrete answers or fall back on easy jump scares and gore, take a walk up Jacob's Ladder.

7.3/10