Matthew Evans - The Jacket

Life can be both giving and cruel, sometimes in perverse order. In the opening scene of the jacket we see a snow covered cemetery with a tombstone marked with a death date of Christmas day in a field somewhere. The narrator starts off by saying …..the first time I died……… which confuses the viewer immensely, after all how can someone die twice. We begin to understand this concept as the movie progresses. We discover that the main character is a survivor of Operation Desert Storm, where he receives a head wound. The Army thought he was dead until he blinked his eyes. The movie picks up again several months later in the US where he meats a woman and her child whose life he would forever change. However no good deed goes unpunished, he’s falsely accused of murdering a police officer and it’s placed in an insane asylum where he is tortured by unconventional methods such as placement in a refrigerated morgue container while still alive. However, he discovers an axis mundi in this place and finds a way to traverse two worlds. At the end of the movie it becomes apparent that the main character has been dead the entire time, communicating to us from the other side through this portal. I’m struck by this concept of the dead interacting with the living, especially in a western tradition that discourages such approaches. This movie makes you think.