!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW HINTS AT THE TWIST ENDING!!

Hollywood’s fascination, particularly from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, of picking at the scabs of America’s unhappy sojourn into Southeast Asia took on a startlingly fantastic bent with Jacob’s Ladder, directed by Brit Adrian Lyne from a script by Bruce Joel Rubin that had been kicking around Tinsel Town for the better part of a decade. The script had repeatedly been hailed as one of the best unproduced scripts of the decade but struggled to find anyone to back it until Carolco finally stumped up the money, meaning that it opened in the same year as another Rubin script concerned with the afterlife, Ghost (1990).

The story owes quite the debt to Ambrose Pierce’s 1890 short story An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and by extension a number of films that were equally inspired or directly adapted from it (a 1961 short adaptation directed by Robert Enrico was cited by Lyne as a particular inspiration, but films like Carnival of Souls (1962), The Survivor (1981), Sole Survivor (1983) and Siesta (1987) might all count as antecedents)). It’s also heavily inspired by the Bardo Thodol, better known in the West as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. If you think this all sounds like heady, deeply spiritual and mind-bending stuff then then you’d be very right.

In October 1971, American soldier Jacob Singer (Tim Robbins on particularly good form) is seriously wounded while on patrol in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta. Four years later, Singer is in Brooklyn, working as a postal clerk and living with his girlfriend Jezebel (Elizabeth Peña), or Jezzie. He’s haunted by flashbacks to Vietnam, memories of his ex-wife and their young son Gabe (a pre-fame and uncredited Macaulay Culkin) who died in an accident before he fought in the war. He’s also apparently being stalked by otherworldly figures. Life is becoming exceedingly strange for Singer – he tries to attend an appointment at the VA hospital only to be told that his regular doctor has been killed in a car explosion and that there’s no record of him ever having attended the hospital before; at a party, a palm reader tells him that he’s already dead and he watches in horror as Jezzie has sex with a tentacled demon; former arm colleagues turn up to recount their own strange tales and confide their belief that they were experimented on with an experimental drug for increasing aggression code-named The Ladder; has a nightmarish trip to a local hospital; and eventually comes to the realisation that he died in Vietnam and that his “life” in Brooklyn has been nothing but an hallucination he suffered as he tried ferociously to cling to life.

Jacob’s Ladder is the sort of film where even the slightest misunderstanding can fundamentally affect your view of the film. It’s not hard to find critics who think that the film is set in 1990 (to be fair, the film isn’t exactly clear on this matter) and question how Singer has remained so young, or others who have mistaken the flashbacks to his pre-war life with his family for some sort of alternative timeline. Neither hypothesis is supported by the film though in fairness to them, it’s a script that often seems reticent to explain exactly what’s going on. Indeed, Rubin‘s script feels like it’s constantly teetering on the verge of collapse, sometimes only tenuously clinging to logic. Lyne‘s direction keeps it all barrelling long sufficiently for you to paper over some of the narrative cracks, bombarding you with enough startling images to keep you off guard as the script becomes increasingly odd.

And it’s certainly a film chock full of unforgettably nightmarish images – the ghostly faces peering at Singer from a passing subway train, the car full of equally sinister forces that almost runs him down, and his fever-breaking plunge into an ice-cold bath. But the real highlights are the extraordinary party scene, from the moment that a palm reader announces that Singer is already dead, to the first appearance of the film’s iconic vibrating head demon to the strobe-lit scenes of Jezzie having wild tentacle sex with a hellish stranger, and the quite unsettling hospital scene. Wheeled off on a gurney, Singer takes a metaphorical descent into Hell itself, an experience he barely survives.

For all its Vietnam references, hints of government conspiracies (the Ladder storyline doesn’t really go anywhere conclusive) and hideous demonic creatures, it’s really a film about guilt, loss and acceptance. For the most part it’s a relentlessly grim, melancholic and even despairing film – only in the very last scene does it finally offer a ray of hope as Singer finally heeds to words of his friend and chiropractor Louis (Danny Aiello) when he quotes 4th-century Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart: “Eckhart saw Hell too. He said: ‘The only thing that burns in Hell is the part of you that won’t let go of life, your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away. But they’re not punishing you’, he said. ‘They’re freeing your soul. So, if you’re frightened of dying and you’re holding on, you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth.”

Rubin made his early career out of films that explored the possibility of an afterlife and the ways that people might react to or interact with it. In Doulas Trumbull’s Brainstorm (1983), science allows memories to be recorded and replayed, even the experience of death itself; Wes Craven’s Deadly Friend (1986) brings a teenager back from the grave as a murderous monster; and Ghost is fairly self-explanatory. Jacob’s Ladder was the last of these metaphysical meditations and the most intellectually challenging and possibly even the most profound. Just how profound it is remains in the eye of the beholder and how likely you are to respond positively to some of the films more outré spiritual tendencies.

The film opened to a mixed critical reception and after a strong opening weekend, box office tailed off as word of mouth spread that this was a “difficult” subject handled in an elliptical manner. But as with so many films that failed to set the box office alight, it’s gained a devoted cult following and has been claimed as an influence on everything from the computer game Silent Hill (and, by extension, it’s 2006 film adaptation) to the Never Ricking Morty (2020) episode of Rick and Morty (2013-)). It was, with crushing inevitability, remade in 2016 by director David M. Rosenthal but the new film sat on the shelf for three years before being offloaded on the DISH Network. A small theatrical run followed a month later, but no-one seemed to care. It was, predictably, a pale shadow of Lyne‘s film, one that failed to find any love from critics or audiences alike and gives the impression of having been made by people who failed to understand anything of what the original film was about.

Crew
Directed by: Adrian Lyne; Carolco Pictures, Inc.; Executive Producers: Mario Kassar, Andrew Vajna; Producer: Alan Marshall; Associate Producer: Bruce Joel Rubin; Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin; Director of Photography: Jeffrey L. Kimball; Editor: Tom Rolf, Peter Amundsun; Music: Maurice Jarre; Sound Recording: Tod Maitland; Costume Designer: Ellen Mirojnick; Make-up Artist: Richard Dean; Special Make-up Effects: Don Mcloud, Arline Smith; Prosthetics Designer: Gordon J. Smith; Special Effects: Conrad Brink; Production Designer: Brian Morris; Casting: Risa Bramon, Billy Hopkins, Heidi Levitt

Cast
Tim Robbins (Jacob Singer); Elizabeth Peña (Jezzie); Danny Aiello (Louis); Matt Craven (Michael); Pruitt Taylor Vince (Paul); Jason Alexander (Donald Geary); Patricia Kalember (Sarah); Macaulay Culkin [Gabe – uncredited]; Eriq Lasalle (Frank); Ving Rhames (George); Brian Tarantina (Doug); Anthony Alessandro (Rod); Brent Hinkley (Jerry); S. Epatha Merkerson (Elsa); Suzanne Shepherd (hospital receptionist); Doug Barron (group leader); Jan Saint (Santa); Kisha Skinner (street singer); Dion Simmons (street singer); Sam Coppola (taxi driver)