Jacob’s Ladder remains a potent watch

THE 1990 cult hit Jacob’s Ladder (available to rent from AroVision and Academy OnDemand), like many truly great movies, came very close to not being made at all.

Writer Bruce Joel Rubin had completed the screenplay a decade before. It was famously on the list of ‘‘scripts too good for Hollywood’’ that floats around producers’ offices.

Rubin’s deep interest in Buddhism is at the heart of his writing, and the Jacob’s Ladder script is – at least partly – a meditation on death and reality.

Rubin would find fame and fortune a few years later as the writer of Ghost, but Jacob’s Ladder was surely his masterpiece.

The film is at once a psychological and a body horror, a war film and a tribute to veterans – and especially the ways in which they negotiated the post-war years in an America that didn’t really want to hear what Vietnam was like. It is also, somehow, a romance and a portrait of a young couple deliriously in love, even while the man seems to be losing his grip on reality. And, of course, by the end, you will realise that Jacob’s Ladder has been something else all along.

Tom Hanks was intended for the lead role, but eventually Tim Robbins – who was better known for comedies – played Jacob. Danny Aiello, Elizabeth Pena, Ving Rhames and a very young Macaulay Culkin also appear.

We learn that Jacob was wounded but is now home in Brooklyn with his partner, working in a mailroom while he studies.

But Jacob is troubled by visions of his platoon’s last day ‘‘in country’’, when they were involved in an enemy ambush. Reaching out to his old buddies, he finds that they have been sharing in his nightmares.

Director Adrian Lyne had the sense to take the script and only change what he absolutely had to, to make the film achievable on a modest budget.

Astonishingly, there are no post-production effects in Jacob’s Ladder. Everything you see on the screen was achieved in-camera, with astounding oldschool know-how. Shooting double exposures at different frame rates was just one of the tricks Lyne pulled.

Over the years, Jacob’s Ladder has only grown in stature, with its influence clearly visible in everything from the Silent Hill game series to the films of M Night Shyamalan. It has been parodied by The Simpsons and Rick and Morty and sampled by record producers endlessly.

All this, for a film I can’t even say too much about in case I spoil it for anyone who has never seen it. Jacob’s Ladder isa brutally effective horror and thriller, but also a thoughtful musing on connection, relationships and mortality.

It is just one of those films that will get under your skin and stay with you. In 31 years it hasn’t aged a day.

Jacob’s Ladder is available to rent from AroVision and Academy OnDemand.