Metro Pulse/Movie Guru/The Cell

Movie Guru Rating:
Enlightening (4 out of 5)

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Serial Serial Killers

While the plot conforms to expectations, The Cell's visuals blow them away

by Chris Neal

I've had it with serial-killer movies. The success of The Silence of the Lambs and Seven apparently convinced every screenwriter on Earth that all he had to do was come up with a nut job with a thing for doing away with pretty girls, add a couple of standard-issue cops or FBI agents hot on his trail, and stir listlessly. Voila! The Bone Collector, Kiss the Girls, blah blah blah.

Those elements are especially annoying in the context of The Cell, a visually astonishing film that is continually hamstrung by a bad case of serial-killer-movie-itis. There's a landmark movie inside this one straining to get out, but those clunky plot elements are just as undeniable as the hallucinatory visuals propping them up.

Up to a point, the plot of The Cell is serial-killer 101: deeply-troubled Carl Stargher (an uneven Vincent D'Onofrio) is abducting, torturing and offing pretty young women. (Is every serial killer's motivation psychosexual?) FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn, disappearing into his rumpled suits) enlists the help of child therapist Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) to help discover the location of Stargher's latest victim, whom he left in the titular execution chamber before succumbing to a violent, coma-inducing seizure. Mildly twisting convention, Deane must literally enter the killer's mind, using pseudoscience so convoluted the movie (smartly) doesn't even bother to address its workings.

Director Tarsem Singh is making his feature-film debut after years of commercials and music videos (one scene in The Cell coyly echoes his clip for R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion"). He uses the scenes inside the killer's head as a launching point for some of the most dazzling, full-throttle cinema anyone's attempted in years. You can feel Singh gleefully plowing through moviemaking convention to bring Stargher's wounded subconscious to teeming life.

The quietly determined Lopez is plunged into a fantasia littered with clues about not only the victim's whereabouts, but the root causes that led to the murders. She must keep her wits in a fetishistic fantasyland (loaded with affectionate nods to Dali, Kubrick, and the Quay Brothers, among others) where this broken man has made himself king.

On the flip side, whenever we return to reality, the air is violently sucked out of the movie. Screenwriter Mark Protosevich's limitations become glaring, as stock characters mouthing rote dialogue push heavy pieces of exposition around. But when Lopez—or, later, Vaughn—prepares to enter the subconscious world, take a deep breath and prepare to be awestruck. In a fruitful collaboration with production designer Tom Foden, costume designer Eiko Ishioka and his longtime director of photography Paul Laufer, Singh brings blazing light to the darkest corners of the mind.

As our guide through all this hoo-ha, much depends on Lopez. She carries the burden of Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound, playing a bookish psychiatrist who also uses clues in the subconscious to solve a crime (in that film, the Daliesque dream sequence was designed by the actual Dali). Lopez, like Bergman, is in the odd position of fighting for believability against her own absorbing beauty. While she doesn't always succeed—her every screen moment is spent with hair perfectly tousled and lipstick carefully applied—Singh turns this to the film's advantage during the dream-world scenes, as the delicate lines of her face and sloping curves of her fabled body become irresistible fodder for the killer's schizophrenic iconography.

Already, reaction to The Cell has been polarized—for every person who loves it, you can find someone else who detests it. In a way, they're both right; its breathtaking flights of fancy take off from a wobbly foundation. But when The Cell does take flight, it is undeniable, brilliantly depicting a reality most of us can't even remember by the time we wake up, but which is whispering to us always, informing our instincts, guiding our actions in ways we can't comprehend.

And while that serial-killer plot is a dreary albatross around the movie's neck, The Cell struggles valiantly, and successfully, to flesh out its characters and story with visual cues. We don't need talking heads to Basil Exposition us to death with background, motivation and character development; we can see it for ourselves, haunting every nook and cranny of the killer's fevered brain—and later, those of his pursuers. And when this beaten man-child finally finds mercy, we can feel viscerally how long he has waited for it, and for a moment forgive the tragically misguided lengths to which he has gone to find it.

Consumer's note: Do not wait to see this film on a tiny, hacked-to-bits pan-and-scan video. Love it or hate it, each carefully composed, lushly rendered frame of The Cell demands to be seen on the largest movie screen available.

Additional consumer's note: If you are considering ingesting hallucinogenic drugs before viewing this film, prepare to spend some time under your seat.