Final (2001)

Denis Leary, with his quick-draw hostility, has spent the majority of his movie career chained to his stand-up comedy rhythms. But in Final, a languid sci-fi nightmare directed by Campbell Scott in the gloomy clinical style of a David Cronenberg film from the '70s, Leary, with close-cropped inmate hair, digs deeper than he has before, and he makes himself over into an arresting lost soul.

He plays a man who wakes up in a mostly bare cinder-block room in what appears to be a Connecticut mental hospital. As he submits to sessions with a comely staff therapist (Hope Davis), Leary exudes a surly vulnerability. He is also seen in flashback memory shards (a visit to a dying parent, a fateful drive in a red pickup truck) that culminate in a conspiracy far crazier than the movie's dour functional atmosphere implies it's going to be. Did Scott, too, get hooked by the 1998 Spanish film ''Open Your Eyes?'' Intentionally or not, he has made ''Overcast Vanilla Sky.''

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