The Cell



""WHERE DID YOU COME FROM?!""

- King Stargher

The Cell is a 2000 psychological-thriller/horror with some sci-fi elements directed by Tarsem Singh, and starring Jennifer Lopez, Vincent D'Onofrio and Vince Vaughn. It is Tarsem's feature-length film debut; he formerly was a director of music videos, such as REM's Losing My Religion. Said background certainly shows in the movie...

J-Lo plays a child psychiatrist named Catherine Deane who is pioneering a revolutionary technology that allows her to enter people's minds by rendering them as virtual environments so she can converse with their inner-selves (this procedure consists, in case you were wondering, of donning a red rubber suit that looks as though it's made of strawberry twizzlers, having a cloth made of computer circuitry draped over one's face and being suspended from the ceiling by wires). She is currently using this technology to try and coax a boy with a unique form of schizophrenia out of a coma.

Meanwhile, there is a Serial Killer named Carl Stargher (D'Onofrio) on the loose. In order to get his rocks off, Carl abducts young, blonde women and takes them to an abandoned farm (the whereabouts of which is unknown to the other characters). There, he places them in a glass tank wherein over the course of a few hours a shower periodically sprays water on them briefly but then stops, but eventually starts and doesn't stop until the tank is filled and they drown. Carl comes back, takes the bodies out, and then bleaches them so they resemble dolls and puts collars around their necks. He then suspends himself above them via chains attached to piercings in his back and masturbates. Geez... talk about Rule 34. Carl has just abducted his seventh victim, Julia, and this procedure has begun again. Vaughn plays detective Peter Novak who has been tracking Carl for some time, but just as they finally apprehend him at his house, Carl falls into an irreversible coma on account of his form of schizophrenia... before he could be questioned regarding the whereabouts of the farm where Julia is soon to be drowned.

So Novak and the FBI take Carl to Catherine's clinic, so that she can venture inside his mind and coax his inner-self into telling her where Julia is. Within Carl's mind, Catherine discovers that Carl's neurosis is divided between the innocent and frightened little boy he is at heart and the evil and demon-like king that he is outwardly. She finds herself seeking to defeat the demon and put the child to rest. Eventually she becomes trapped in Carl's mind (turning off the virtual reality machinery would kill her) and Novak goes in after her. There he sets her free, and discovers the clue to where Julia is. While he goes off to rescue her, Catherine brings Carl into her mind so she can slay the demon, but can't kill him without killing Carl entirely.

All this is interspersed with a bucket-load of seemingly random imagery that alternates between Design Student's Orgasm, Fetish Fuel, Gorn, Nightmare Fuel, Mind Screw/True Art Is Incomprehensible and Squick (though usually some combination thereof). This includes but is not limited to:
 * In the opening scene, J-Lo riding across the Namibian desert in a white feathered dress, dismounting, ascending a sand dune a small bit, then looking back on her horse which has turned into a chess piece, then approaching a ruined boat half-buried in the sand next to a dead tree, and briefly talking to a boy who then suddenly turns into a werewolf-like creature.
 * A horse standing in a room, then a wall-clock ticking backwards and upon reaching the end a set of glass panes coming down and severing the horse, sushi-style, into several neat pieces that remain suspending in mid-air within the glass; only with the horse not dying and still being alive with the separated chunks of its lungs still breathing and its ears still twitching.
 * A collection of doll-like, corpse-like women inside display cases depicting scenes behind glass panels, attached to crude machinery that jerks them about in a series of grotesque, sadomasochistic, sexual poses whilst they moan and groan in pleasure/pain; including one in a dentist's chair, a ballerina, and a giant, rubbery-looking female bodybuilder with no nipples.
 * A demon-like version of Carl with two giant purple sheets of cloth attached to the rings in his back and wound around the walls of his throne room.
 * Three doppelgangers of Carl's mother frozen, staring up at the sky and then in sequence turning to look at Novak and reciting a message about Carl before turning back to stare at the sky again.
 * Novak being shackled down, having a hole cut in his chest and having his intestines pulled out and spiraled around a rotisserie whilst a vulture caws nearby.
 * A room resembling a Roman temple with an albino peacock, where Catherine appears dressed as the Virgin Mary and offers consul to the little boy Carl, and then the room turning dark and worms and a tarantula appearing on young Carl as the evil Carl emerges from a pool of water, and Catherine turning into a warrior princess to battle him, and then back into the Madonna to baptize (thereby killing) the young Carl.

None of this is given a great deal of exposition regarding what it all means. Some critics have espoused that none of it honestly means anything and is in the movie solely to look pretty (which it does).

Critical reception to the film has been mixed. Whilst the visuals (e.g., sets, props, costumes, special effects) in it are praised almost universally, the plot, script, acting and the like are usually regarded as mediocre at best. Some critics have attacked it for its strong misogynistic imagery. And a small brouhaha arose over the fact that at the start of the film, Catherine, a child psychiatrist, smokes a marijuana joint. Many felt it was a rip-off of Se7en and Silence of the Lambs, with a dash of The Matrix. Roger Ebert liked it, in any case.

In 2006, Singh would go on to release the better received, but equally visually impressive film, The Fall.

An In Name Only Direct to DVD sequel was released in 2009.


 * Abusive Parents: Carl was abused by his father, which gives Catherine some sympathy for him. Novak (and some irritated critics) claims that it would take more than a father who hit him to make Carl do the things he did. Note that the split personality is part of the disease, and the same thing is happening to Catherine's other patient.
 * Black Bug Room: Almost the entirety of Carl's mind; though the house where he remembers his father beating him most prominently.
 * Clean Cut: That poor, poor horse. Or was it? It didn't appear to actually die... That poor, poor horse!
 * Costume Porn
 * Dark and Troubled Past: All 3 main characters. It's implied that.
 * Enemy Within: The demon king side of Carl's personality.
 * Fan Service: See Male Gaze, below.
 * Femme Fatale: When Carl has corrupted Catherine, she becomes dressed in a black lace nightgown with a red collar, thereby evoking a black widow spider (see Fetish Fuel, below); when Novak enters Carl's mind, she distracts him with a kiss whilst Carl incapacitates him.
 * Fluffy Fashion Feathers: The white dress.
 * Freudian Excuse: It's a serial killer movie. This trope is pretty much a given. The best part is that.
 * Girl in a Box: Imagery of this calibre is used extensively throughout the movie.
 * Journey to the Center of the Mind: Obviously.
 * Living Doll Collector: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh boooooooy...
 * Male Gaze: Near the start of the film there is a scene where Catherine is in a short dressing gown and goes to look in the fridge; here there is a gratuitous, pointless close-up shot of J-Lo's arse. This is not a plot point... it literally serves no other purpose in the movie other than to be a gratuitous, pointless close-up shot of J-Lo's arse.
 * Mental World: Also obviously.
 * Mercy Kill: Carl tells Catherine that he once drowned an injured bird so that his father wouldn't find and kill it. Catherine does what symbolically amounts to the same thing to him in the end.
 * Mind Screw
 * Pieta Plagiarism:.
 * Pimped-Out Dress: J-Lo gets two: the white, feathered wedding-style one in Edward's mind, and the red one in Carl's mind.
 * Police Are Useless: Not only do the cops wait to storm Carl's home until after he's suffered the neural glitch that puts him in a coma, but.
 * Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts
 * Scenery Porn/Gorn: All of the scenes inside people's minds are exceptionally designed, but are often quite hostile or frightening.
 * The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: Averted; the schizophrenia shown in the movie resembles an exaggerated form of catatonic schizophrenia. Even the ideas of it being caused by viruses and presenting through abnormalities have a basis in reality. Wilson's infraction is completely made up, though, as is the idea of schizophrenia presenting with intense migraines.
 * Serial Killer
 * Shirtless Scene: Vincent/Carl gets a bunch.
 * Shout-Out: Many scenes in the movie are homages to various real-life works of art. The aforementioned sliced-up horse scene and the Carl's mother doppelgangers are homages to a sculpture by Damien Hirst and a painting one of Tarsem's friends has in their house, respectively.
 * Carl's victims are also found on a riverbed, dead, wrapped in plastic. And before Carl is captured, he sings "Marsie Dotes", which Leland sang in the second season.
 * At one point, Catherine gets trapped in a closet and is forced to watch Carl get abused by his father. It's shot to look almost exactly like a similar scene in Blue Velvet.
 * Catherine is shown watching Fantastic Planet before going to bed.
 * The scene of the three identical women frozen in what looks like a scream is a shout out to the painting Dawn by Odd Nerdrum.
 * Slave Collar: A pervasive motif.
 * Strawman Political: Notably averted. The film seems to disagree with Novak's views on the Freudian Excuse, but still treats his view (and any audience members who share said view) with respect.
 * What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made on Drugs??
 * What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic
 * Woman in White: J-Lo in the opening scene.
 * You Have 48 Hours: The detectives had 40 hours before Julia drowned.