Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin once dreamt that he’d gotten off a train and ended up trapped in a subway station with no exits. The only way out was “through the dark tunnel…into some kind of awful hell.” Out of his nightmarish vision emerged Jacob’s Ladder (1990), a tragic, terrifying portrait of a mind on the edge and what pushed it there. Similar unsettling imagery haunts its protagonist Jacob Singer (played with a boyish sweetness by Tim Robbins), a Vietnam war veteran not only grappling with violent flashbacks of his military service, but also the grief of losing his youngest son.
As the film progresses, he’s plagued by paranoia and hallucinations, the world of the film growing increasingly disorienting and oppressive as it mirrors his fragmented mental state. Demonic creatures torment Jacob, who begins suspecting he’s part of a government conspiracy and coverup. An outlier in director Adrian Lyne’s filmography of erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction (1987) and Indecent Proposal (1993), the bodies in Jacob’s Ladder are instead grotesque, even unnervingly inhuman.
