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The Cell [DVD]

Screenplay : Mark Protosevich

MPAA Rating : R

Year of Release : 2000

Stars : Jennifer Lopez (Catherine Deane), Vince Vaughn (FBI Agent Peter Novak), Vincent D'Onofrio (Carl Stargher), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Dr. Miriam Kent), Jake Weber (FBI Agent Gordon Ramsey), Dylan Baker (Henry West)

"The Cell" takes an old science fiction trope--what if we could somehow enter into another person's subconscious--and uses it to explore that unique horror of the machine age: serial killing. And, as flashy and visually inventive as the film is, its greater importance lies in the way it explores the duality of serial killers in a way most films won't dare.

The narrative imagines the human mind as a great landscape that others can, via an experimental procedure involving virtual reality suits and computers, enter and walk around like explorers. When the film opens, a social worker named Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) is exploring the mind of a young child who has entered a coma-like state. While the boy's body is motionless and does not respond to stimuli, his mind is still active, and it is envisioned as a great desert in which the boy hides, afraid of an imagined boogey man.

The research company for which Catherine works is asked by the FBI to explore the mind of a recently captured serial killer named Carl Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio). Carl, who suffers from a rare form of schizophrenia, had a seizure just before his capture and went into a coma from which he will probably never awake. Unfortunately, he has recently kidnapped a young woman, and the FBI knows that she is locked away somewhere in a glass room that will, in less than two days, fill with water and drown her (this is Carl's particularly sadistic form of torture/murder). FBI Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), who relentlessly tracked and captured Carl, wants Catherine to enter Carl's mind and try to convince him to divulge where the kidnapped girl is being held.

When Catherine enters Carl's mind, it is like walking into a nightmare painting by Francis Bacon. Films of all kinds have tried to capture the essence of dreaming on-screen, but I'm hard-pressed to remember one that so effectively conveys the hard edges and insane logic of a nightmare as this one. "The Cell" imagines Carl's mind as a sort of freaked-out medieval kingdom, where a young, frightened Carl as an abused child hides from the demonic presence of Carl's inflated adult imagination of himself as a killer. Serial killers have a penchant for playing out fantasy roles, and Carl's fantasy of himself has taken over most of his mind.

While on one level "The Cell" is an effective suspense thriller, it is also very much about the duality of serial killers. While one character states quite firmly that he believes the opposite, the film takes very seriously the notion that serial killers are not born, but rather created through physical abuse, psychological torture, and sickness of the mind. In this way, it stands apart from most serial killers films ("The Silence of the Lambs," "Seven") that position serial killers as the machine-like embodiment of ultimate evil. They may be charming and intriguing as characters, but they are always constructed as beings that were simply born evil. "The Cell," on the other hand, takes a different approach, even becoming sentimental toward Carl, as Catherine becomes obsessed with trying to heal his damaged mind by reaching out to the scared child that hides within.

But, at the same time, the film doesn't shy away from the atrocities Carl commits. In fact, it shows in squirm-inducing detail the results of his work, which involves soaking his victims' bodies in bleach and turning their corpses into giant dolls. Carl's sickness also extends to himself, where he puts his own body through ritualistic torture by suspending himself by metal rings that he has inserted in the skin on his back. Yet, by entering Carl's tortured subconscious and realizing it as a three-dimensional world, the film constantly reinforces his past as well as his present. The demonic Carl who rules his mindscape is a direct result of the child who is beaten by an abusive father who catches him playing with dolls.

Unlike most science fiction and horror films, the screenplay for "The Cell" (by first-time writer Mark Protosevich) doesn't spend much time establishing rules for its world. In fact, there is little explanation at all about how the concept of entering another person's mind really works. The only bit that is given is the idea that, if Catherine begins to believe that Carl's mind is, in fact, a three-dimensional reality, then her body might begin to react as well. In other words, if something physically damaging happens to her while she is inside Carl's mind, her body might react as if it were real and she might die.

First-time director Tarsem Singh is an Indian-born filmmaker who got his start in music videos (one scene in "The Cell" seems to have been filmed on the same stage used for his video for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion"). He is an inventive visual stylist who knows how to get a reaction. His camera is constantly roaming, and, once inside the mindscape, it drops all pretenses of expected movement, swirling and rising, sometimes going upside down, other times jerking and cutting quickly, zooming out too fast in order to induce a sense of panic and loss of control. Other times, he sets the camera back and takes in wide vistas that create a sense of unreality with their hallucinatory expansiveness.

"The Cell" is an undoubtedly bizarre film, a truly unique experience that is as much a nightmare itself as it is about nightmares. Its imagery is strange and disjointed, but eerily logical. The mindscapes are an amalgam of the futuristic and the medieval, and it is later shown that much of Carl's world is influenced by pictures he has around his house. In its own way, the film seems to be arguing that we are influenced by the pictures we see, both still and moving images.

Yet, if there is lasting importance to "The Cell," it is in the way it rethinks typical cinematic representations of serial killers. Carl is extended sympathy for his sickness, but not excused for his actions, much in the way the child murderer in Fritz Lang's masterful thriller "M" (1931) is shown as a pitiable man whose mental disease makes it impossible for him to stop what he does. We are not asked to forget or necessarily forgive what Carl does, but we are asked to understand why he does it.

©2000 James Kendrick