Critics reviews

One of the scariest, most depressing and exciting films of the 1990s.

What make [Jacob's Ladder] so persuasive are the performances of Robbins and Peña. Robbins plays Jacob with a boyish innocence: this is a man who lives in the light, which makes his dark descent all the more tragic. Peña... brings a soulful sensuality to Jessie, who can be kind and nurturing but also cold and controlling.

A masterpiece of horror cinema... All the actors are truly great in their roles, and Robbins’ performance rivals that of what he delivered The Shawshank Redemption. He has the heart and joy of the character, and has the ability to shift terror into anguish with extreme skill.

Underpinning Rubin's approach to the story is the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead), a lesson for human consciousness in the moments after death: it is revealed at the end that Jacob has died on the slab in Vietnam, felled by the bayonet of one of his own men, rendered berserk by the hallucinogens—and all the subsequent action was a depiction of his soul in a liminal state. Preposterous (and even offensive) as this might seem, the film earns it in spades

Messy and maddening though some of it is, Jacob's Ladder is also a truly scary film which is never simply a war or horror vehicle... Lyne's giddying, unsettling direction conjures up moments of horrifying hallucinogenic power from the bad-trip hell of his protagonist.

A bizarrely cohesive hybrid of war movie, character study, art film, and horror flick... Attempting to pull story strands together and climb out of the labyrinthine terrain Lyne and his commendable production team have constructed may prove frustrating, but it’s a struggle essential to the emotional power of the film. The very act of watching the film is so emotionally draining that the viewer leaves the film feeling worked-in; the thought of repeat viewings is daunting yet insatiable.

One of the most haunting and overlooked films of the 80s... The film’s mood is felt above anything else in the piece, and working from a stellar script by Ghost scribe Bruce Joel Rubin, director Lyne is deftly able to create a sense of perpetual unease and dread rarely seen in most movies

A radical experiment in genre mixing from the unlikely team of director Adrian Lyne (FLASHDANCE) and writer Bruce Joel Rubin (GHOST), it is, like the similarly cryptic and paranoid MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), a masterpiece that transcends any auteurist interpretation: Arguably, its real author is the American subconscious. It's also a beautifully acted film, something one rarely says of horror movies.

Around twenty-four hundred years ago Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly and when he awakened he did not know if he was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was a man." The sense of metaphysical free-fall conveyed in this sentence from Jorge Luis Borges's great essay "A New Refutation of Time" is like the disorientation one feels after watching a gripping and involving movie — a movie like Jacob's Ladder, for instance.

In the best puzzle movies, the pieces fit--eventually. But if you try to piece together “Jacob’s Ladder,” all you get for your trouble is more pieces... The multi-layered weirdness works on a basic, horror-film level but it’s without psychological resonance. We’re more concerned with the nature of the events than with the nature of the man they’re happening to.

"Jacob's Ladder" enters into the hallucinations of a desperate mind, and lives there. It evokes a paranoid-schizophrenic state as effectively as any film I have ever seen... [It] is a thoroughly painful and depressing experience - but, it must be said, one that has been powerfully written, directed and acted.

"Jacob's Ladder" is a slick, riveting, viscerally scary film about what in other hands would be a decidedly unsalable subject, namely death... There is much to admire in the way the pieces of this elaborate puzzle come together, but there are too many disappointing compromises. Whole characters, particularly Ms. Pena's warmly carnal Jezzie, seem to have left their larger purpose somewhere on the cutting-room floor.