PLOT: A mysteriously traumatized tool-and-die worker is sleepless for months, his waking hours filled with paranoid delusions.

Yes, this is the movie for which Christian Bale lost 50 pounds (some say 60) on a daily diet of a can of tuna and an apple.

The result isn't pretty, and director Brad Anderson trains his camera on every starving pore and sallow square inch of face, visually caressing the contours of Bale's sunken cheeks and eye sockets like Mars Global Surveyor extreme closeups.

With a horror like that, who needs a movie?

Needless to say, Bale goes the extra mile for the role of title character Trevor Reznick, an insomnia-stricken machinist whose waking hours are haunted in the European sense a la Kafka. He can't sleep, he can't eat, he's followed by a mysterious, evil-looking brute named Ivan (John Sharian) and in his delusional state, causes a limb-losing accident at work.

Despite her best efforts, Trevor finds no solace with Stevie (Jennifer Jason-Leigh), the lovestruck "hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold." (At this point, Jason-Leigh may have played more HWAHOG's than James Spader's yuppie scum and Chris Walken's weirdos.)

He similarly doesn't find relief with Marie, the single-mom waitress at the airport coffee shop he patronizes, and with whom he falls into a relationship. Unfortunately, every time he tries to get cozy with either Stevie or Marie, Ivan keeps entering the picture -- amid other portents of evil and mysterious incongruencies.

Why is all this happening? Clearly it has something to do with the nature of reality, but a "reason" reason shows up in a nicely wrapped package in the last few minutes of the movie, and it appears to have been lifted from the wastebasket Rod Serling used to discard unusable Twilight Zone twist endings.

As the movie progresses, see if you can read the signposts up ahead that suggest what that ending is.

Meantime, Brad Anderson does a terrific job of painting the town various shades of soot grey, dirty brown and black -- the town being Barcelona, the surburbs of which stand in for a depressing blue-collar American anytown a la New Jersey.

The factory where Trevor works is a smoky industrial hell that would give a Vulcan a coughing fit.

Anderson also shows some flair for spooky surroundings, particularly in a sinister carnival funhouse scene that is the scariest in the movie.

Apart from Christian Bale's starving face, that is.

(This film is rated 18-A)

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