31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 10: The Cell

2000.

We did it. We survived the 1990s and now we're a third of the way to Halloween. How you feeling so far?

Here’s a high concept pitch for you: Inception meets Hannibal. Let’s jump inside the mind of a disturbed serial killer and have some adventures inside. Sounds fun, right? Can you imagine a nightmare full of imagery too baroque for most JRPGs? That’s the journey we’re going on in The Cell, directed by Tarsem Singh.

Singh is one of those directors I wish better for. He’s a darling filmmaker for a certain set of movie nerds. Somebody is going to reply to this about how I really need to see his second movie, The Fall from 2006. (Yes, I’m getting to it. One day, I promise you.) Even his less-loved movies like Immortals or Mirror/Mirror employ incredible imagination and artistry behind them. Immortals is a boring fantasy movie that Singh turned into a unique work of art. Nobody else out there is working with such intense style in live-action. And if they are, they are not making movies intended for wide audiences.

The Cell was too bold for 2000. Going through the original batch of reviews, they’re mostly negative. I’ll get back to one later that stood out to me. Many critics just did not understand what this movie was doing, or were turned-off by its more gruesome elements. Audiences though, flocked to the movie en mass. It made over $100 million at the box office. But these days, The Cell is largely forgotten. It's a cult classic without a cult. I don't hear many horror fans arguing for it. Somebody does write a piece once a year arguing The Cell should be rediscovered. Those pieces never work, the movie remains buried in obscurity. I do not expect to turn things around for this movie.

The Cell’s plot involves two concepts, one horror, one SciFi. The horror concept is about a serial killer, Carl Rudolph Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio playing to type), who traps women in pre-programmed contraptions that drown them after days of slow watery torture. Carl is suffering from a brain disease that has created his schizophrenia, and that disease strikes him comatose the very minute before the FBI catches him. That leaves the head investigator, Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn), mere hours to save Carl’s latest victim, but with no way to talk to the killer. Luckily, there is also the SciFi premise. This is an experimental VR machine that allows researchers to jump inside your brain and share a dream. With no other option, Agent Novak recruits the best psychiatrist on this team, Catherine (Jennifer Lopez, hello again), to jump inside Carl’s mind and find the clues.

The dream premise allows Singh to go as wild as he wants with the art design. We open with Catherine inside the dream of a little boy, riding a white horse through the dunes, in a feathery dress that would not look out of place in a Final Fantasy game. Carl’s imagination, unsurprisingly, is even more vivid. Sometimes his world is disturbingly beautiful, such as when he sits at the top of a throne room with massive curtain-like wings stretching out. Or it’s all twisted and bloody contraptions, like something out of a kinky music video. There's also the indescribably weird. A horse gets split apart into a dozen segments – and is still alive.

While the Carl we see in the real world seemingly nothing but a heinous monster, his dream-self is often more innocent. Real Carl likes to go hard on the sadist fetishes. In a very awful scene, he suspends himself on S&M piercing hooks to masturbate over a woman's corpse. Dream Carl can either be a grotesque Shin Megami Tensei boss, or to Catherine’s surprise, a lost and troubled little boy. Catherine soon loses track of the mission, instead hoping save whatever is still human inside this monster.

The ticking clock premise does continue through The Cell. Agent Novak goes on his own dream journey and will do his best to save the day. But the movie largely loses interest in this. Eventually the real question becomes how close Catherine can get to Carl. Plenty of horrible things happen in The Cell, including one gruesome moment involving Vince Vaughn’s guts and a crank. But this is not an exploitation movie. It’s a movie that wants us to understand that there are no monsters, only victims. The world does not need to perpetuate cycles of punishment and pain. What we instead have is a splendid ending where Catherine reaches out and brings Carl a kind of peace.

That leads me to that one review that really stood out. I typically do not want to call out reviews, but this was especially bad. It’s a Slate piece from 2000, written by David Edelstein.  Quote: “…I don’t want to see the serial killer (or even his inner child) coddled and empathized with and forgiven. I want to see him shot, stabbed, impaled, eviscerated, and finally engulfed – shrieking – in flames.” This is terrible, Dave. It’s one thing for a critic to miss the point of a movie, it’s another thing entirely to get it, then outright reject it because the filmmakers are capable of more sympathy and humanity than you are. Edelstein is also getting to the heart of the problem. He wants pure evil that can be destroyed by the golden heroes. However, that doesn't speak to the reality of this movie, or real life.

The entire serial killer obsession is often one that looks to dehumanize, to exploit. Jeffrey Dahlmer has been in multiple horror movies, mostly bad ones. They view him as this purely evil entity. However, the real Dahlmer, was no demon. He was a sad, pitiful, lonely man. It’s easier to reckon with super genius maniacs than homophobic societies and incompetent police forces that allowed people like Dahlmer to exist. The Cell is playing in the policing fantasies of FBI criminal profiling, which have turned out to be largely bunk. Luckily the movie is not solely interested in that worldview. It can also imagine a better more just place than what policing alone can offer.

Next time we travel to 2001, the year of the tabloids completely inventing a summer shark scare, the New England Patriots wasting a sixth round pick on some nobody loser called Thomas Brady who will never amount to anything, and our next movie, Dagon.