As a perennial winter lingers outside, the even chillier recesses of the mind of Jack Starks (Adrian Brody) are haunted by inexplicable waking nightmares. However, there are obvious problems inherent in the logistics of time travel in film and this one is no exception. If you ignore them, this supernatural, psychological horror thriller is passably engaging. Opening with a sequence shot in the ghastly green light of night-vision videocam, affable soldier Jack Starks takes a shot through the head during the US military Persian Gulf campaign in 1991. He is assumed dead and sent to the morgue, not for the last time. One year later, back in the states and suffering lingering memory malfunction from his combat ordeal, good Samaritan Jack helps little Jackie and her stoned mother out of car trouble and is rewarded with The Jacket (straight) after being wrongly convicted of a cop killing just down the road.

If that plot is a little hard to follow or swallow, the rest will be more of a challenge but not necessarily a highly rewarding one. Leap ahead to 2007 when Jack finds himself at a Vermont truck stop where orphaned Jackie (Keira Knightley) works as a waitress and dreads Christmastime. As Jack struggles to piece together the puzzle of his tormented past and haunted future, a superfluous and distracting romantic liaison with the grown up Jackie does little to clarify or convince. Instead we flash back and forth over the twelve year span and focus on several days of Jack’s incarceration at a hospital for the criminally insane (as if such places still existed) before his second, but maybe not final, death. He is tormented at the hands of Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), a self-appointed vigilante psychiatrist in service at the hospital. Several subordinate doctors stand by somewhat feebly, including a sullen Dr. Lorenson (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who is embarked on her own questionable electroshock treatment of a young boy.

The story unravels with heavy emphasis on close-up views of Jack in Becker's special isolation chamber meant to repair and "re-set" the violent proclivities of unbalanced patients. Plied with experimental drugs and confined to a space no bigger than his own soul, Jack’s suffering puts a spiritual spin on his quest to figure it all out and perhaps save others if he cannot save himself.

It is hard to get past some evident clichés and put the story in contemporary Vermont. The repeated ominous image of the hospital exterior after dark echoes the opening battlefield scene in its ghostly green light and is worthy of Dickens. Though the thought of being buried alive always elicits an uneasy pang, the presentation lacks credibility in its outrageousness. Brody, Knightley, Kristofferson, and smaller roles filled by Steven Mackintosh, Mackenzie Phillips and Daniel Craig lend a capable ensemble cast component to the mix but I am not sure the end result is worth their efforts. Director John Maybury exhibits a flair for the unconventional approach and may have meant to suggest redemption and saving one's soul, but the final shots of a contented Jackie, the real cop killer, and a remorseless Becker confuse this conclusion.