THE CELL
Tarsem Singh should have had a bigger career. As most directors did in the ‘90s, he cut his teeth in music videos (if you saw R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, you know his work well). THE CELL was going to be his big breakthrough. I saw it opening day and came out of it heady that we had a new visionary on the board.
THE CELL, if you haven’t seen it, centers on a child psychologist who uses an experimental “telepathy” machine (my words, not the movie’s) to project her consciousness into her patient. Together doctor and patient can find solutions to problems by exploring the patient’s mind’s eye — which takes the shape of large, fantastical landscapes filled with illusions of Id and Ego. Things go south when she’s compelled to enter the mind of a comatose serial killer; she has to find out where his slowly drowning last victim is being held before time runs out.
I’ve heard a few compare it to A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, but it really has more in common with DREAMSCAPE and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (both favorites of mine) than a Freddy Krueger adventure. The dream sequences are amazing. Colorful. Bizarre. Operatic. The camera and lights do nothing but justice to Jennifer Lopez; it’s difficult to imagine between this and OUT OF SIGHT a more beautiful woman on-screen. Between her and the art design, THE CELL comes across as the best kind of spectacle.
If I have any complaint with it, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough with Vincent D’Onofrio’s serial killer. It does its best to balance his three different personalities (the abused child, the pathetic murderer and the godlike sadist), but I kind of felt ripped off by how tame his monster’s visions were. As vicious and grotesque as they are, you can’t help but feel the safety net of a major studio at work.
Still, I have no idea why Singh’s career went so still-born afterward. Maybe he pissed off the wrong people? Who knows. It’s one of those unanswered questions. Like, how’d Singh belly-flop when someone like Brett Ratner kept getting a pass to the front of the line?
