The Jacket (2005)

The Jacket arrives from 2005, a year in which a filmmaker could still strap a Gulf War veteran into a morgue drawer and call it psychology. John Maybury's picture follows Jack Starks, played by Adrien Brody with the wounded solemnity of a man who has read the script twice, as he slips fifteen years forward while bound in a straitjacket that supplies the title. The asylum is grim, the psychiatric staff divides neatly into the cruel and the humane, and the time travel exists to rescue a woman from her own bleak future. None of this engages the cultural questions of the present moment, and the film makes no effort to pretend otherwise.

The picture does extend a few faint courtesies toward modern sensibilities. Keira Knightley's Jackie and Jennifer Jason Leigh's Dr. Lorenson are granted intelligence and moral weight, and the latter risks her career on a single unsanctioned treatment. Jackie, however, spends much of the running time as a destination, a woman to be saved by the rewriting of her past, which places her squarely in the tradition of the damsel rather than the agent. Angel Coulby appears in a minor supporting role, the lone note of casting variety in an otherwise monochrome ensemble, though the defaults of the era explain that more than any conscious design.

On the matter of sermonizing, the film is nearly mute. It gestures at the cruelty of psychiatric experimentation but frames that cruelty as the work of one bad doctor, never as a system, an economy, or a society. Race, class, climate, and the body as anything other than a site of violation go unaddressed. Neurodivergence is treated as gothic affliction, cured by an unsanctioned jolt of electricity. What remains is a moody, stylish artifact from a period when a psychological thriller could stay just that. For those of us who catalogue such things, it registers as a light vintage: atmospheric, confused, and entirely of its time.