The Cell (2000)

The Cell (2000)
Written by Mark Protosevich
Directed by Tarsem Singh

I have always heard a lot of things about this film, many of them conflicting with each other. I’ve been told it’s cheesy and relies on its visuals solely as a means for telling a story, and it fails at that. I’ve been told it’s a serious rumination on the mind of a serial killer. I’ve been told it has great acting, and I’ve been told it has terrible acting. After watching it, I can say that all of these things and none of these things are true about The Cell. I can see why there is a large gap in the types of people that like and hate this film, and I can see what inspires such a difference of opinion.

Former child psychologist Dr. Catherine Dean (Jennifer Lopez) has changed the course of her career over time from a regular psychologist, who analyzes and tries to resolve thoughts and feelings of children, to an active participant in the reality of a child’s mind. This film takes place in a frame of time that is not readily available. While it looks contemporary, the technology used in the film certainly isn’t meant to represent anything in our current world, but at the same time, nothing else sticks out as extraordinary.

The technology I’m talking about, of course, is a large bio-computer that links two minds together, so either person could enter the mind of the other they are linked to, or vice versa. Since Catherine has been trained to enter the mind, she is the only one that does it, having an untrained mind enter into hers could prove problematic.

On the other hand, the beginning of this film is the culmination of the hunt for a serial killer named Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio), who the FBI knows has taken yet another girl captive after finding his latest victim near a river bed. FBI Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) is hot on the trail of the killer, and when the next woman goes missing he knows they have a very short amount of time to find the killer and his next victim. They zero in on the killer but as soon as they are about to make the arrest, Stargher has a schizophrenic seizure and goes into a coma before the FBI can find out where his latest victim is. They feel like they are out of options and have nowhere to go until one of the FBI’s doctors recommends Novak to check out Dr. Dean, to see if she could travel into Stargher’s mind and find out where the latest girl is being kept.

Once they overcome the obstacle of Dr. Dean never having gone into a malicious mind before, they hook her up to the machine so she can enter Stargher’s mind. These images, the representations of Stargher’s mind and imagination are what made this movie well known. The story relies on the fact that Dr. Dean has always been inside the minds of children, most of them innocent enough to want to be helped, whereas Stargher is a schizophrenic serial killer with deep issues surrounding his childhood. Once inside his mind, Dr. Dean tries to use the childish representation of Stargher that wanders around to get to the adult Stargher, thinking maybe she will gain his overall trust. The problem is, Stargher is a schizophrenic, any predictable behavior he might have gets buried under the physical failures of his brain. So the test is on to see if Dr. Dean can make him crack or find a way into the corner of Stargher’s mind where he has hidden the location of the girl.

Like I said before, this movie isn’t famous for being a great movie, it’s famous for being visually inventive. I’ll give it that for sure, it is one of the best visually realized movies I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a lot of really well made movies. As far as special effects go, they are some of the best on display, and they work to achieve a surrealistic atmosphere unlike any that has ever appeared on film before. If painters such as Dali or Bosch had this type of technology at their fingertips, I don’t doubt they would have made films using the similar visual techniques (although Dali did dabble slightly in film, by the time of his death it wasn’t yet to this point in technology).

However, the visual accomplishments of this film are not its only merits. Sure, the camera techniques and special effects are brilliant, they surely have not been done with as much visual flair before or since, but other movies have done similar things. What makes this film special is the incorporation of these techniques to tell such an accomplished story. Instead of just being there for visual effect, the images themselves tell the story better than most people would expect from a film that relies so heavily on visual effects. The effects are the story, and the story wouldn’t be able to exist without these effects. For this, the director Tarsem Singh is to be commended, he took crazy visual ideas that were incorporated as flair in the music video world and turned them into an immersing and original story.

The acting is not wildly fantastic, but it works well enough to tell the story at hand. Vaughn and Lopez both play their characters well and create a believable relationship forged in a singular goal. Still, it is the original storytelling and visual flair that saves this movie from being a mediocre serial killer film. The chosen point of view, in the mind of the killer, is so well chosen and then executed that this film sits apart from other movies it might be compared to. This point of view would not be available however, if it weren’t for the top notch special effects and superb direction. While this film is not super rich in subtext, it does change the idea of what a movie can be, and what visual effects can achieve within the confines of a story, instead of just being there to shock and impress. I really liked the cohesive relationship between the visual style, the effects that lend themselves to that style, and the story being told. A very interesting and well made film, even if it’s not a shocking revelation to the genre.

8.4/10