THE MOST FRIGHTENING THING ABOUT JACOB SINGER’S NIGHTMARE IS THAT HE ISN’T DREAMING.
Mourning his dead child, a haunted Vietnam War veteran attempts to uncover his past while suffering from a severe case of dissociation. To do so, he must decipher reality and life from his own dreams, delusions, and perceptions of death.
Striking an incredible balance between the realism of life in the rundown Brooklyn of the mid-70s and the hallucinogenic horrors of a man being dragged into the underworld, Adrian Lyne's (FATAL ATTRACTION, FLASHDANCE) only horror film above all is truly unsettling in a way we rarely see on the big screen. Anchored by the brilliant performance of a shaggy-haired Tim Robbins, and uninterested in basic jump scares or narrative hand-holding, JACOB'S LADDER was underseen and undervalued at a time when "psychological thriller" was the trojan horse marketing term for "elevated horror" (think THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS) and a harrowing look at PTSD on the heels of the Gulf War was commercially unwelcome. Rightfully recognized now as one of the finest horror films of the 90s, JACOB'S LADDER pulls no punches and provides no relief from its disturbing and heartbreaking journey into Hell. - Steven Landry