The Cell (2000)

DIRECTED BY: Tarsem Singh WRITTEN BY: Mark Protosevich CAST: Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D'Onofrio, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Jake Weber

MPAA: Rated R for bizarre violence and sexual images, nudity and language Runningtime: USA:107

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RATING: 9/10 

"enter the mind of a serial killer" 

What if you could see your dreams come alive? What if you could walk amidst your thoughts, emotions, memories and desires as if they formed a world of their own? A world where laws of physics do not apply, where everything is possible.

"The Cell" is created by a team of newcomers, who have not yet been influenced by the stereotypical film industry, and feels therefore as a much needed breath of fresh air. It's imaginative, bizarre and probably one of the most beautiful films Hollywood has created since Francis Coppola's "Dracula".

Your dreams, thoughts and feelings take physical form and you can interact with them as with your present surroundings. In a not too distant future this is a reality, and psychiatrist use this to gain a more complete understanding of their patients. Catharine Deane, a very clever child psychiatrist is working on a boy that has lost touch with reality. At the same time, within the confines of an abandoned rural farmhouse, Stargher, a psychologically disturbed killer has built The Cell, a glass-encased chamber where he drowns his innocent female victims before continuing a sadistic post-mortem ritual with their bodies. The horror and despair that the kidnappings have created, makes the FBI agent Peter Novak react. In not too long, they make the arrest, but too late. The killer falls into a deep coma, while his final missing victim only has a few hours left to live. Now it is up to Catharine to enter the mind of a killer in the search for the answers to uncover the location of th! e missing girl.

Written by first-time writer Mark Protosevich, "The Cell" takes the story from "Silence of the Lambs" as a frame for first-time director Tarshem Singh's ingenious imagination. Singh has a beautifully sculptured pace. No time is wasted on scientifical explanations, that ruins most of the films, and he elegantly leaps to the emotional and psychological core of the story. The film really takes off when Catharine enters the killers mind. The result is shocking and spectacular.

Like David Fincher (Fight Club, Se7en), Singh had been a director of musical videos, before he was discovered by the clever producers. His first motion picture does bare the mark of these elements. His visual style is more rich and colorful than anything that Coppola and Tim Burton have created so far. In musical videos the key is visual imagination, a rare talent of portraying your emotions and thoughts through images. And Singh has this talent. He is a composer of images. He makes music come to life and paintings start breathing. Repulsively graphic, bloody, twisted, surreal, weird, magical, frightening and almost poetic with its dreamy symbolism. There are no words that can describe the grotesque world that is created, but I can promise you that you'll have an incredible experience. Singh's attention to detail and symbolism is nothing less than astonishing. Desert dunes, catacombs, Middle Eastern-flavored chambers, images of dismemberment, decay, torture and religious salva! tion, snow, cherry blossoms, monsters, horrors, water, light, air -- an extraordinary palette of weirdness and expressive arcane. Even the shadows cast by tree leaves seem meticulously art-designed.

In a way this is the most psychological of psychological thrillers to date. A film that portrays a deeper understanding of the complex human mind than the rest of the movies of its kind, presenting it as a unique world of its own. There are no actual characters in this film, except the psychologist and the killer himself, whose personalities are reflected through their virtual minds and connected to their actions. When it comes to acting, that is almost nonexistent. The actors are more like puppets on a stage, not quite knowing what they are doing, and since there is no real story, they are completely in the director's mercy. Singh is the only one that knows what's going on, and the actors' job is simply look pretty in the frame, which Lopez certainly does. She can act, and she can provoke sympathy (which is more than I can say about most of the models and singers that turn to acting). So it doesn't have a concrete plot, no real characters to speak of, no deep-going acting, an! d yet "The Cell" is incredibly interesting and complex nonetheless. It crawls into your mind, under your skin and make all the little hair on your neck stand up. It is a rare experience, both emotional and psychological.

Like all brilliant works of art, it's brilliance lies in its simplicity. You take with you what you bring to it. This film is entirely individual and every one will understand it differently. The experience of watching it can be compared with admiring a painting or listening to music. It's abstract and engrossing. To me this is pure brilliance brilliance and a haunting experience, and I hope that it will refresh a genre that needs all the help it can get