Jacob's Ladder

Jacob's Ladder is the most upsetting film about grief ever made in a major studio, and it spent thirty years being remembered mainly for its monsters.

Those monsters are extraordinary and almost none of them are creatures. Lyne's demons are made out of camera and body: a head that vibrates too fast to read, achieved by shooting an actor shaking at a low frame rate; a face with the features wiped off; something with no eyes at a party; a hand where a hand should not be. The most frightening thing in the film is a man in a hospital corridor who looks ordinary and then does not, and the second is a gurney ride through a basement ward in which the walls are made of parts.

But what the film is actually doing with them is the achievement. Jacob Singer has a dead child, a lost marriage, a job delivering other people's letters, and a war he cannot get a straight account of. Tim Robbins plays him with no self-pity at all, which is the only reason the film is bearable. Elizabeth Peña's Jezzie and Danny Aiello's Louis are the two people being kind to him and the film is deliberately unclear about whether either of them is there.

The structure is the horror

Scenes contradict each other. Jacob wakes from one life into another; his dead son is alive in the next shot; a doctor he visited has been dead for years; the men from his platoon agree about what happened and then do not. Rubin's script was written over a decade and passed around Hollywood as unfilmable, and Lyne shoots it with total conviction and no visual signals — no ripple, no dissolve, no change in grade. You are given no apparatus for telling which layer you are in, which is precisely Jacob's problem.

Louis's speech is the key to the film

Aiello's chiropractor delivers a paraphrase of Meister Eckhart: that the only hell is on earth, and that if you are frightened of dying and holding on, you see devils tearing your life away — but if you have made your peace, the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth. It is said in the middle of the film, as a kindness, by a man rubbing somebody's back, and it is the complete explanation of everything the audience has been watching.

Where it is weaker

The conspiracy thread — the lawyers, the car bomb, the car in the alley — is the least interesting material and takes up the middle of the film. Jezzie is written as a function. And the final revelation, while devastating, retroactively flattens some genuinely strange sequences into exposition.

For the same marriage-shaped nervous collapse filmed without a safety net, Possession; for the same unreliable account of a man's own deterioration, Session 9 and Videodrome.

The short answer: Jacob goes back to the apartment he shared with Sarah and his sons before the war. The house is empty and quiet. He sits down, and then goes up the stairs — and Gabe, the son who died in a traffic accident before Vietnam, is sitting on the landing. Gabe takes his hand and the two of them walk up the staircase into a white light. The film cuts to a field hospital in Da Nang in 1971, where army surgeons stand over Jacob's body on an operating table and one of them says that he looks peaceful, and that he put up a fight. Jacob died of the bayonet wound in Vietnam. Everything after it — the postal job, Brooklyn, Jezzie, the demons, the conspiracy, the lawyers — happened inside the moment of his death.

Is Jacob dead the whole film?

Yes. The final scene establishes that he never left the field hospital: the wound he receives in the opening flashback is the wound he dies of, and the hour and fifty minutes in between are the duration of his dying. The film's title is the clue it gives you at the start — Jacob's ladder, in Genesis, is the ladder between earth and heaven with angels going up and down it — and the Eckhart speech is the instruction manual.

What was the Ladder in Jacob's Ladder?

An experimental drug. Michael Newman, a chemist, tells Jacob that his unit in Da Nang was dosed with a compound derived from BZ, designed to strip away inhibition and increase aggression, administered without their knowledge in a field test. The effect was that the platoon turned on each other, which is why Jacob's bayonet wound was not inflicted by the enemy. Whether this scene is true inside the film is exactly as uncertain as everything else, and it does not need to be true to work: it is the account Jacob's dying mind constructs to explain an injury that came from his own side.

What is the Meister Eckhart quote in Jacob's Ladder?

Louis, the chiropractor, paraphrases the medieval mystic: that there is no hell except the one here, and that the devils you see tearing at your life are only angels freeing you from the earth — if you are afraid of dying and clinging on, they look like demons, and if you have made your peace, they are what they are. Every apparition in the film is reframed by it. The things chasing Jacob are not punishing him. They are trying to get him to let go.

Who is Gabe?

Jacob's youngest son, killed by a car before Jacob was deployed to Vietnam, and the real wound the film is about. Macaulay Culkin plays him in flashback and in the final scene. The war, the drug, the conspiracy and the demons are all machinery; the thing Jacob cannot let go of, and the thing waiting at the top of the stairs, is a dead child. Rubin has said the film is about dying rather than about Vietnam, and Gabe is the proof.

Did the US Army really test BZ on soldiers?

The film's closing title card states that BZ was used experimentally on American troops in the 1960s and that the Pentagon has denied it. BZ — 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate — is a real incapacitating agent that the US weaponised and tested on volunteers at Edgewood Arsenal during that period, and the Edgewood programme is documented. The specific scenario in the film, a combat unit dosed in Vietnam to increase aggression, is not established and is the film's invention.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

Reality anchor 086 is near the ceiling — only 10 works score higher. Nothing in the film is reliably sequential and the entire running time turns out to be one moment.

Tone 008 is bleak — 11 works score lower. A child is dead before the film begins, the protagonist is dead before the film begins, and the kindest reading of the ending is that he stops resisting.

Viscera 052 is just above the median film — 59 works score lower. A bayonet wound, a car bomb, a body in an alley, and a hospital ward made of parts.

Era bias 028 reads analog — 41 works score lower. 1990 film stock, in-camera frame-rate tricks, practical prosthetics and optical compositing.

The threat at 060 leans human — 78 works score lower, which is the right reading for a film in which the demons are angels and the actual injury was inflicted by Jacob's own platoon.

Pace 030 is slow — 42 works are slower. It is a man walking around a city asking questions.

On jump scares: a handful, and the vibrating head is the one everybody remembers.