'The Cell': Mind-Ogling By Michael O'Sullivan Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, August 18, 2000

In "The Cell," Jennifer Lopez plays a therapist who enters the twisted dreams of a psychopath (Vincent D'Onofrio). (New Line Cinema)

"The Cell," a wild (and I mean wild) feature debut from the Indian-born and U.S.-educated Singh (Harvard briefly, then Pasadena's prestigious Art Center College of Design), aims to peel back your eyelids even further. In this regard at least, the tale of a psychologist (Lopez) who enters the mind of a comatose serial killer (spooky Vincent D'Onofrio) to identify the whereabouts of his soon-to-be-next victim, languishing in a timer-controlled torture chamber, is an unqualified success.

For those who will complain that the script by fellow first-timer Mark Protosevich does not make sense – and I have no doubt that there will be such quibbles from a dowdy few – there's little remedy, I'm afraid. Eyes and synapses unschooled in the visual ellipsis and rapid-fire shorthand of the video age may find the hallucinatory and color-saturated sci-fi nail-biter too heavy on style and too light on substance.

The heck with them, I say.

Take "The Silence of the Lambs," a similar themed FBI/psycho-killer crime drama. "Cell' is a lot better looking and, when you think about it, makes just as much (or as little) sense as the Jonathan Demme film – more sense, in fact, than certain other recent Gen-X thrillers, say "Pi," from visual wunderkind Darren Aronofsky, whose eye-catching debut never did hold up to close intellectual scrutiny.

But back to the facts.

By the time the FBI has cornered wacko Carl Stargher (D'Onofrio), their quarry is lying on the floor in a naked heap, parallel rows of metal C-rings piercing the flesh of his back (hey, it's an an S&M thing, you wouldn't understand). A rare form of schizophrenia, it seems, has sent him into a state of catatonia before he could finish drowning and bleaching (yuck) his latest prey, a young woman who sits in a water-tight bunker in an undisclosed location waiting for the sprinklers to come on.

Now to agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), who has a bit of a Messiah complex, the collar's less important than the confession, so he rushes Stargher to the doc (Pruitt Taylor Vince), who recommends putting him through a sort of experimental mind-meld with therapist Catherine Deane (Lopez) at the helm. Deane has only once attempted the radical treatment, which involves a combination of psychotropic drugs and electronic brain mapping, and that was with a sweet little boy in a vegetative state, and not a cold-blooded murderer.

Entering this dream world, Singh hits his stride – although, truth be told, he's pretty good with the blood, guts and torture stuff too. The realm of the twisted mind, where the distinction between logic and illogic is moot, is a pictorialist's playground, and the notoriously perfectionist director has a field day playing with our notions of what's up and what's down. Lavishing the screen with baroquely imagined sets and elaborate, fetishistic costumes reminiscent of contemporary art star Matthew Barney's "Cremaster" film series, Singh paints a nightmarish vision of a tour through unconscious hell.

What Deane encounters inside Stargher's head is a dissociative psyche that's split in two: One half is a frightened little boy reliving childhood trauma and the other a sadistic beast bent on retribution for all his perceived wrongs. It is the child who Deane must get to talk and the hulk she must avoid.

In other hands, and with a less talented, understated cast (which also includes Dylan Baker and Marianne Jean-Baptiste as cucumber-cool cyber-shrinks and Jake Weber as Novak's low-key partner), "The Cell' could easily have devolved into a run of the mill cops 'n' killers suspense-o-rama. Maybe at heart it isn't much more than that, but around this familiar construct Singh has fashioned such an original and stylish vision of insanity and filled it with such adrenalized, heart-stopping thrills that by the time the ocular numbness wears off it doesn't really matter that we haven't been anywhere.

We've certainly seen someplace special.

THE CELL (R, 107 minutes) – Contains nudity, graphic gore, torture, corpses, imaginary bogeymen, obscenity, drug use and child abuse.