Source Code Review

The whole machine runs on eight minutes, and Duncan Jones understands that repetition only holds attention when the information changes. Each pass through the Chicago commuter car rearranges the same furniture: the spilled coffee, the comedian doing his bit, Michelle Monaghan smiling at a man who is not the man she thinks he is.

Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens with a rising panic that never tips into hysteria, and the small physical comedy of a soldier waking up inside a schoolteacher's body carries more of the picture than the bomb plot does. Vera Farmiga does the hardest work, playing most of her scenes into a monitor and still building a person out of guilt and procedure.

The trouble is Jeffrey Wright, saddled with a limp, a cane and a set of speeches that explain the rules of a device the film would rather nobody examine. Those rules do not survive examination. The last ten minutes push past a perfectly good ending into a coda that quietly erases a man named Sean Fentress and invites us to find the result romantic. Don Burgess shoots the loop cleanly, the train interior lit warm against a cold blue world sliding past the windows.