The Jacket is a time-travel thriller that sends Adrien Brody, as a Gulf War veteran named Jack Starks, ricocheting back and forth between 1991 and 2007. But the most interesting trip British filmmaker John Maybury takes in this ultimately disappointing film isn't forward in time, but back-back to the silent film era, when directors like Eric von Stroheim and Carl Dreyer used extreme close-ups of the human face to express emotion with an eloquence that sound pictures would struggle to match.

With his steep Alpine descent of a nose, thick brows and deeply mournful eyes, Brody was born for just these kinds of close-ups, and Maybury makes the most of his singular looks, which are part medieval saint and part French New Wave film star. Much of The Jacket's erratic power comes from tight shots of Brody's eyes as they fill alternately with terror and compassion. To appreciate how much Brody is doing, and how skillfully, it is only necessary to watch his co-star, Keira Knightley-normally a pleasing prospect, but whose face by comparison remains a lovely blank.

Yet it isn't just Brody's face that fascinates Maybury, a painter as well as a filmmaker (and whose previous film, Love Is the Devil, was about artist Francis Bacon, whose distorted figurative paintings are also studies in terror). Jack Starks is a Christ figure, and Maybury photographs Brody's tall, wraithlike frame like a piet?á, his body broken by the suffering he has endured.

After a harrowing near-death experience during the Gulf War, Starks returns to his native Vermont, where, in good Samaritan fashion, he stops to help Jean (Kelly Lynch) and her young daughter, Jackie, whose pickup truck has broken down on a snowy back road. But the drunken Jean mistrusts his offer, and Starks is left to catch a ride with an ex-convict (Brad Renfro), who in short order shoots a police officer and frames Starks for the murder.

Before you can say One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Starks is tried and sentenced to a facility for the criminally insane. There he meets his Nurse Ratched in the form of Dr. Becker (Kris Kristofferson), who treats Starks like a lab rat, feeding him powerful hallucinogens and strapping him into a primitive straightjacket that resembles a shroud. Shoved into a corpse drawer in the morgue, Starks undergoes a series of nightmarish visions of his future, where he encounters Jackie, now grown into an embittered young woman (Knightley) poised to replay her mother's wasted life-unless Starks can, through his own sacrifice, find a way to alter her fate.

Despite Brody's arresting performance and the presence of several other intelligent, independent film stalwarts-Jennifer Jason Leigh as a sympathetic staff psychiatrist, Daniel Craig as a fellow inmate and Steven Soderbergh as producer-The Jacket remains far less than the sum of its promising parts. Maybury's visual flair outpaces his narrative skill, and what initially feels mysterious gradually turns tedious, even hackneyed. The Jacket is a trip through time that begins with von Stroheim, but whose final destination is Stephen King.