The Jacket

"I was 27 the first time I died," announces Jack Starks (Adrien Brody) in enigmatic voice-over at the beginning of The Jacket, warning us that we'd better sit up and pay attention. We wouldn't want to miss the second and third times, would we?

Actually, we would, but only because they add even more unanswered questions to an already confusing plot. Here's what I'm (relatively) sure of: In 1991, Jack sustains a head wound in the Gulf War. He dies, and is resuscitated, suffering from shock-related amnesia.

Nine months later we meet him hitchhiking on a wintry Vermont road where he stops to assist a drunken, disoriented woman (Kelly Lynch) and her eight-year-old daughter, Jackie (Laura Marano). Next, he's accepting a ride in a truck headed for Canada; they're stopped by the police, fade to black, and a dazed Jack has just been tried for murder and committed to an institution for the insane.

So much for the first 10 minutes.

Shot mainly in Scotland and Canada by gifted cinematographer Peter Deming (Mulholland Drive), The Jacket is a time-travelling sci-fi thriller that looks marvellous but never untangles itself from its own ambitions. As Jack is wrapped in a straitjacket and confined to a morgue drawer, he "visits" a disturbing future, accompanied by head-thumping montages and an excess of sub-plots, starring messed-up women: Jennifer Jason Leigh as a sleep-deprived, sympathetic doctor and Keira Knightley as a grown-up Jackie, trailing the damage of her dead mother. Is Jack the victim of hallucinatory drugs, or is he really seeing his own future?

Confidently directed by artist and experimental filmmaker John Maybury, The Jacket's intense visuals and Brian Eno score are at times reminiscent of the work of Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem For A Dream). But the movie relies on too many bad acid sequences and a limp love connection between Brody and Knightley - struggling here with her first role to require serious acting. Don't worry, Keira: Bend It Like Beckham Again is being written as we speak.