A source of strength - Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal in 'Source Code'

An exclusive look at the mind-bending new thriller

What would you do if one morning you woke up in someone else’s body? Would you freak out? Would you run to the mirror to find out if you’re younger or slimmer? Or would search for someone to explain what is going on -- and why? In Source Code, the mind-bending new thriller opening Friday, Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan star in the spring’s first blockbuster. CAHIR O’DOHERTY reviews the big budget flick.

In Source Code, which opens on Friday, April 1, Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, an American soldier who finds himself trapped in a sort of miniature time machine that keeps sending him back to re-live the last eight minutes of another man’s life.

That’s right, another man’s life. Without giving too much away, Stevens discovers that each time he goes back he’s inhabiting the body of an unknown Chicago school teacher on a fast moving train, just minutes before that man is blown to bits in a terrorist attack.

Colter’s mission, we quickly learn, is to find the identity of the person who planted the bomb on the train before another one is detonated. It’s amazing how quickly this wacky set up establishes itself.

Then along comes the charismatic Irish American actress Michelle Monaghan (best known for her turn in the Boston Irish crime drama Gone, Baby Gone) who plays Christina, a character designed to smooth over the rough edges of a script that hurtles along at a breakneck speed.

Some critics have seen elements of Groundhog Day and Christopher Nolan’s Inception at work in this increasingly eerie thriller, but really they’re just being lazy.  The real influence shaping every frame of this taut paranoiac thriller is Alfred Hitchcock, and the aura of intensifying menace is a throwback to Hitchcock’s specialty -- unlikely strangers battling it out on a high-speed train.

Source Code is dark, claustrophobic and weird enough to draw you in and keep you guessing most of the way.  Its ace card is a lovely understated performance by Monaghan, 34, a consistently underrated actress who brings much needed humanity to this otherwise fairly creepy tale.

Yes, that’s right, it may look like a cookie cutter sci-fi thriller, but it must be said that as Source Code progresses and the plot points are revealed, it gets darker and more disturbing, not less so.

It’s fairly edgy material for America’s favorite boyfriend Gyllenhaal, 30, but he’s note perfect in a role the presents a new side to the pec-tastic everyman (if everyman looked as consistently adorable).

On paper Gyllenhaal may be one of the highest paid actors in America, but he’s still one of the most approachable (thanks to careful career guidance by his mom, he says).

But that very approachability has allowed some to take advantage. After a recent screening of Source Code at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas a photographer attempted to film Gyllenhaal as he used the urinal. For his impertinence the cameraman was body slammed against a wall by the justifiably outraged actor.  So sometimes you have to feel for the nonsense these stars have to contend with.

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