Stream It Or Skip It?

Interesting career, Guy Pearce – after L.A. Confidential and Memento, he seemed primed for a pile of Oscar noms and fat-paycheck Hollywood roles. But good on him for taking a more unpredictable path, carving out a place as a character actor in oddball productions instead of trying to be the next Tom Cruise or whatever (it took him until 2024 to snag an Oscar nod, for The Brutalist). The Infernal Machine (now streaming on Paramount+) is one of those oddball productions, Pearce in the lead in an adaptation of a story originally written for The Truth podcast, about a reclusive author who’s driven to madness by a persistent letter-writer. And the result of this oddball production is an oddball movie that goes so hard at times, you almost have to admire its ludicrousness. Almost.

The Gist: Bruce Cogburn (Pearce) stomps his cowboy boots up to a payphone somewhere in scrub-ridden rural California, drops in a quarter and firmly tells an answering machine, “I never do interviews.” Someone named William DuKirk mailed Cogburn a handwritten letter asking the renowned writer for help on his own book. Cogburn’s reply-via-telephone is firm and cold, although he tells the machine he empathizes with anyone staring at a blank page. Cogburn’s return to his truck is waylaid by a brief staredown with a big scorpion, which he leaves unstomped – perhaps Cogburn thinks he’s a bit of a scorpion himself. But the more he tries to sting DuKirk, who sends letter after letter after letter, the less effective the venom, it seems. “Piss off,” Cogburn snarls into the machine before he drives home to pour large amounts of brown liquor down his gullet and await the arrival of the daily DuKirk correspondence.

So why is Cogburn a misanthropic isolationist solipsist drunkard hermit recluse? Once upon a time he wrote a celebrated novel titled The Infernal Machine – then watched in horror as a gunman climbed into a clock tower in Knoxville and killed a bunch of people, then blamed the book for his misdeeds. That was 1981. Twenty-five years later, Cogburn still hasn’t recovered from the fallout. He lives alone in the desert just past the middle of nowhere, and drinks and puffs on Marlboro Reds and does not much else, although getting righteously pissed off and defensive over DuKirk’s persistent letters seems to be his new hobby. Signs of growing paranoia include him getting a guard dog and taking target practice with his rifle, a pragmatic way to dispose of his many empty booze bottles.

One night, Cogburn gets haaaammmmmmmmmmerrrrred and drunk-dials DuKirk over and over, slurring diatribes into the answering machine. He awakens the next morning half-in, half-out of the phone booth with a cop, Officer Higgins (Alice Eve), standing over him. She seems nice enough, and shockingly, Cogburn shows an ability to hold a standard conversation with another human being. The letters keep coming and Cogburn begins investigating their origin, pulling at the strings of what seems to be a convoluted conspiracy to render him insane. Meanwhile, we’re privy to flashbacks to happier days when Cogburn was a writing prof with a gifted student, moments that give context to his current predicament. So what will unravel first? This mystery or Cogburn’s sanity? 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Infernal Machine is a writer-loses-his-marbles story a la Secret Window or maybe Barton Fink, crossed with heavy-duty rug-pullers like Fight Club or The Game – or more accurately Serenity, the Hathaway-McConaughey fiasco notable for being an unintentional laff riot. 

Performance Worth Watching: Suffice to say, Pearce gives far more of himself to the movie than it deserves. My main question has nothing to do with his commitment to a deeply flawed screenplay, and more to do with why his weathered-and-leathery Cogburn looks more like The Beach Bum than the kind of guy who sits in his house all day with the blinds drawn.

Memorable Dialogue: Cogburn interacts with his student in a flashback:

Student: What if I don’t have anything to say? 

Cogburn: Then you’re not digging deep enough.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s a moment here where Cogburn whips out some tutorial advice and says, “What’s the greatest sin a writer can commit? Being dull.” Advice that writer/director William Hunt, adapting Louis Kornfeld’s story, takes so seriously, he foregoes plausibility for a series of bizarre developments that makes you seriously wonder if The Infernal Machine conflates fantasy and reality, and plays out within Cogburn’s delusion. This isn’t a spoiler, just a theory I concocted about a third of the way through, when I became increasingly divorced from the emotional components of the story and more concerned with what the hell the writers of this movie were thinking. 

Absurdist without being particularly funny or entertaining, The Infernal Machine keeps pulling the rug out from under Cogburn, and therefore us, wholly subscribing to another bit of writerly advice: Torture your protagonist. But this level of literary flogging is over-the-top ridiculous. It seems as if Hunt wants to put us through the wringer so our experience of the film mirrors Cogburn’s ballooning frustration, but the film’s transparent manipulation is rooted in its desire to be wildly unpredictable and provocative. 

And it pays a steep price for that choice, sacrificing its characters and potentially thoughtful themes on the altar of hammer-to-skull irony and self-referential quasi-cleverness: There are bits here where Cogburn’s endless soliloquies to the answering machine go “We’re at the end of act two, aren’t we?” during the final moment of the film’s second act; another screed includes a warning about the finale being “a big pile of shit.” While The Infernal Machine tends to take its own advice to heart, it selectively ignores this last bit, opting instead to make the entire movie one of those.

Our Call: Just to be clear, “one of those” is “a big pile of shit.” SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.