Jacob's Ladder

Jacob Singer survives an ambush in the Mekong Delta and returns to a life in Brooklyn that keeps slipping: subways that will not stop, a hospital that is not a hospital, faces that shudder.

Adrian Lyne achieved the head-shaking effect by filming actors moving their heads at four frames per second and playing it at normal speed, which produces a motion the eye cannot resolve. It has been copied constantly, most obviously by Silent Hill, which is essentially built from this film.

The script by Bruce Joel Rubin sat around for years being called unfilmable.

What holds it together is Tim Robbins playing exhaustion rather than fear, and Danny Aiello as a chiropractor delivering the film's thesis about angels and attachment in one speech.

The ending recontextualises everything, and unlike most such endings it makes the film sadder rather than cleverer.