Jacob's Ladder 4K 1990

The darkness that descended upon the curtained room enveloped it in its animalistic twilight, cloyingly highlighting the surrounding decor and the shape of every little thing that had settled in its rightful place. Each of them appears as a ghost on this night, brought to life by its own will. These atmospheric tones, creating the described setting, which was best suited for getting acquainted with this film, were oppressive from the very beginning.

What is memory? A complex of memories without which a person's life loses its meaning? What is the point of living if you don't remember, if you've forgotten everything, as if all the music had been erased from your iPod? It's a different player now, and even if you try to restore it, the playlist is unlikely to remain the same. Memory is everything you are. The mind has played a cruel joke on the film's main character, Jacob Singer, a soldier who once fought in Vietnam. It drives Jacob, like a beast, into his own depths, and part of his memories do not want to part with their owner just like that. Fragments torn from an unsolved puzzle, is this reality or not?

Hell itself in this sense is a never-ending repetition of the past, a vicious circle that works like a wheel, spinning a string of horrors interspersed with moments of calm and, finally, glued-together images, memories that torment the hero. As Jacob goes through all the circles of hell, we climb with him up the staircase of his nightmare, where each step is incredibly difficult, each step up adds a burden incomparable to that of a human being.

Everything in this film is so cohesive that to discuss each argument separately would be to slap its creators in the face. The acting (with Tim Robbins in the lead role), the cinematography, the sound design, all these strange, hazy landscapes that seem like another world, images of impending hell, create an overall mood of oppressive, slow, and methodical agony. If someone wants to turn off the film, unable to bear watching it, these people can be understood, but the chewed-up ending, even if it cannot be grasped at first glance, will pay off in full.

If this film were released today, many would not understand it, mistaking the monotonous horror for some kind of prop, which is a pity. This film cannot boast of anything fast-paced, nor can it scare you with its abomination. Instead, it offers a unique plot, a slow-paced atmosphere that gets on your nerves in a different way, and scares you with a slightly perceptible inexplicable hostility. It's not even about the demons that surround the main character, but they are made with complete rejection, and in the unknown. A powerful philosophical subtext is quite obviously hidden in this film in the general idea, permeated with ideas about Hell and Paradise; the biblical motif is hidden even in the name of the main character, and many details are ironically depicted with hints - Jacob's former profession, which is philosophy, the advertising of the slummy New York subway, loudly proclaiming only one word, and a lot of other little things that come together to form a single image of an alternative, incorrect reality.

The bloody sunset signifies the uncertainty of what will happen. Jacob has lingered too long in the darkness, and as he faces the bloody dawn, he can be sure that his prolonged nightmare is coming to an end.