The Cell (2000) [Limited Edition] – 4K Ultra HD

***/**** Image A- Sound A Extras A+*
starring Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Marianne Jean-Baptiste
written by Mark Protosevich
directed by Tarsem Singh

by Walter Chaw It’s a collision of travel-worn ideas, this movie–a tired serial-killer thriller married to Dreamscape–and the wear shows whenever someone mouths their ration of exposition like a toothless shut-in gumming their daily soup-soaked toast. Yet Tarsem’s The Cell is also a collection of astonishments, visions so startling and sticky they linger like the midnight-carnival sequence in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn: a hellish gallery adjacent to Clive Barker’s nightmare mosaics of violated flesh. Portions of it were inspired by the techniques perfected by the Catholics during the Spanish Inquisition, and no one knows invasions and perforations of the body like the Catholics. Now imagine Eiko Ishioka designing the costumes for this infernal Mass; Howard Shore composing the score; and Tarsem (a.k.a. Tarsem Singh), a Desi-American artist steeped in the eye-popping iconography of the Hindu pantheon, pulling the strings. Even the supporting cast (Jake Weber, Dylan Baker, James Gammon, Dean Norris, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and so on) is a murderer’s row of total bangers, albeit tasked with the most serviceable roles. There’s too much talent here for the story at hand. It’s like inviting the 1927 Yankees to play in a beer-league softball tourney.

Though Tarsem garnered a cult following for The Cell and his 2008 follow-up, the passion project The Fall, he’s primarily known for his commercials and music videos (he did the one for R.E.M.‘s “Losing My Religion”), and I’m not convinced that music video isn’t the ideal showcase for his specific, if specifically prodigious, talents. He’s best in three-to-four-minute chunks. Consider a tableau that takes shape a little over an hour into The Cell in which dream-warrior Catherine (Jennifer Lopez) is overpowered by dream-weaver Carl (Vincent D’Onofrio) and thrown to the floor, supine, next to a bathtub full of blood and the corpse of someone Carl’s murdered. As Catherine lies there, Carl, bleached white, his shoulders encrusted with what appear to be salt deposits, his hair sculpted into long, asymmetrical horns, crawls over her like a spider probing its paralyzed prey, pausing to sniff her crotch before gazing up at Catherine with a look that, in another context, might be erotic but is horrible here in its presumption and terrible knowledge. It’s not even the strongest image in the film, although it would be the strongest image in most films. It occurs in a sequence that finds Catherine propelled into the subconscious of one antagonist, the terminally catatonic Carl, by, arguably, another, FBI spook Peter (Vince Vaughn), in order to reverse-incept the location of Carl’s latest, still-kicking victim (Tara Subkoff). To do this, Catherine needs the innocent version of Carl, a child hiding in his brain, to trust her. Trust takes time. Time is the last thing they have.

When I first saw The Cell upon its release in 2000, I was stunned by the visuals but largely wrote the picture off as yet another attempt to capture the grim aesthetic magic of David Fincher’s Se7en from five years previous. Still, in the two-and-a-half decades since The Cell, I have sometimes found myself ruminating on certain passages, on the feeling of dread it elicits and the sense it engenders of witnessing forbidden sights. I used to regard it as exploitation; now, it feels more like a deeply immersive Francis Bacon exhibit. Watching someone’s dreams should feel icky. The dreams themselves should be expressionistic hallucinations. Tarsem nails it. The Cell is lodged in the part of my brain where I store stuff like Ken Russell’s Altered States. But while the film remains a frequent artistic triumph, a good portion of it has gone from overripe to necrotic. Start with an excruciating Jennifer Lopez in the lead. She plays a gifted navigator of dreamscapes who seems neither brilliant nor alert enough to pass a concussion protocol. Most of the time, she comes across as barely lucid, and I doubt that’s part of the character. Somewhere between Steven Soderbergh’s Out of Sight and The Cell, Lopez began to equate a kewpie-doll voice and urgent whispering with the emotional language of great seriousness and concentration. What it does is highlight the different focuses of Soderbergh and Tarsem. Lopez is doing some weird, Judy Holliday-on-lithium gag. She’s the film’s mortal flaw. Granted, she does look great in Ishioka’s biomechanical rubber suits, or tricked out as an Egyptian goddess with sterling silver face gear, and I wonder if she was cast as a clotheshorse–our generation’s Zendaya.

Would that more time were given to Carl and the real hostage of his warped mind, the woman in the tank, and less to Catherine and Vaughn’s lawyer-turned-FBI-profiler, who’s just as limp and enervated as she is. In the “real” world of the film, Carl is a quiet, strange dude tooling around town with an albino German Shepherd called “Valentine.” When he sees a girl he fancies, he, with an able assist from good boy Valentine, abducts her and imprisons her in a Lucite cage, where she is left to suffer for 40 hours, at which point an automated system begins to fill the container with water. Once his victim has drowned, he washes her in bleach to remove as much pigment as he can, suspends himself above the corpse using metal hoops pierced through the skin and meat of his back and upper arms, and pleasures himself while hanging there. Catherine theorizes that Carl does this to feel weightless, as though also suspended in water, but given the agony and the flesh-tearing, I’m not sure that’s the correct read. The Cell is built on incomplete answers, with presumptions like Catherine’s going unchallenged. (True-crime fans will be disappointed.) I wanted desperately to mine some import from Catherine watching René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet in bed the night of Carl’s first kill, but apart from it making for a stylishly surreal cutaway, I got nothing. The Cell is a rhetorical dead end. For all the time spent in the unconscious, there’s almost no interest in translating the language through which the unconscious communicates. I figure there’d be a Jungian among the scientists monitoring Catherine’s jaunts to help untangle the archetypes. Alas, all the wonders Tarsem provides are treated literally, like one of those directional signposts festooned with distances to various boroughs in the area: “Childhood Trauma, 5 miles” this way; “Sexual Hangups, 10 miles” back the way you came.

Worse, instead of being critical of the dream team’s inability to interpret images, The Cell rewards them for it. Isn’t anyone curious as to why Carl imagines himself clothed in the majestic raiments of mythological beings? How he sees himself as half-man/half-beast hybrids like the Egyptian pantheon? Do the death rituals of Egyptian royalty have anything to do with his dark tastes? And if so, would that prompt a search for American heartland equivalents to pyramids and stone sepulchres? Had the dreams in The Cell been as unimaginative as those in Nolan’s Inception, this wouldn’t matter so much–but there is obviously subtext in Tarsem’s atrocity exhibition. All the “brilliant” detectives and dream warriors attempt to do is get the child version of Carl to narc on the adult version. I wonder whether developing the visual concepts in tandem with the screenplay would have influenced the writing of it. 

The actual hero of the film might be costume designer Ishioka, who returns to moviemaking eight years after winning an Oscar for Bram Stoker’s Dracula to tell an entire story of dominance and submission, illicit passions and forbidden sexual fantasies, majestically perverse religiosity and other grand ceremonial piercings and penetrations, through her metal and silk creations alone. Carl’s gowns in his subconscious–one streaming a fifty-foot-long, eat-yer-heart-out-Cyd-Charisse train that’s still flowing in the background when Carl emerges in the fore–suggest a thrillingly ambiguous sexual identification, if not a dangerously erotic BDSM kink. I think often of the long hallway of doors opening into displays of Carl’s past victims as dolls connected to clockworks that force them into dehumanizing positions. They remind me of the doors of perception bursting open to rapturous gusts of wind in everything from Black Narcissus to The Trouble with Harry to Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I think of how Ishioka’s vision of the Egyptian Goddess Isis looks suspiciously enough like the Virgin Mary that Tarsem got in a bit of trouble for it, and how this could have been her attempt to merge the two mythologies right where the central Egyptian and Christian mother stories converge. What if Carl, in other words, imagines himself as his mother and his mother as the Mother? What if he sees himself as a demigod? What if he sees his labours as fatted calves in honour of his unknowable and terrible father? It’s all there in Ishioka’s work–and nowhere in the film’s text.

Ishioka reunited with Tarsem on The Fall, and her work there would again be the most interesting and worst-squandered aspect of a film I wager wouldn’t hold a fraction of the fascination it does today without her. Lift Ishioka’s contributions from these creaky expository disasters, put them on display at the MET, and announce a transcendent art installation–a Matthew Barney fantasia equal parts discomfiting and awe-inspiring. As far as The Cell goes, what would be left behind in the vacuum is another high-concept church of dead girls flick with an unusually good monster performance from D’Onofrio and unusually bad everything else. In all fairness, I wouldn’t begin to know how to contain Ishioka’s feverish designs in a narrative, either.

THE 4K UHD DISC
Arrow brings The Cell to the 4K UHD format in a two-disc Limited Edition. (*Unfortunately, for whatever reason, we were only provided the first disc for review.) The 2.39:1, 2160p transfer, featuring backwards-compatible Dolby Vision, parallels the film itself in that scenes set outside the dreamworld are drab and…brownish, is it?…while the fantasy realm is vivid and colourful. It reflects something other than a stylistic choice: a disinterest, really, in the talky parts that extends from the production to the mastering process, so that this expository stuff I always want to fast-forward is treated with the same level of slipshod, almost embarrassed attention. The attention-grabber sequences, however, are for the most part exactly that, with shock-vibrant colours, tastefully amplified highlights, and bottomless blacks, not to mention tactile grain. The only drawback is that the extensive digital compositing can result in some telltale clipping of the whites, but the additional detail makes up for it, even when it’s vaguely nauseating. (Like those salt-encrusted shoulders, which on inspection suggest tiny tumors.) The 5.1 DTS-HD MA track has, if anything, aged more gracefully. Its acoustics are impressively uncanny, whether evoking the vast emptiness of the Namibian desert or the dampness of claustrophobic hideouts, while the dreamscapes take full advantage of the discrete soundstage, LFE channel included. Now if only there were a way to somehow take the marbles out of J-Lo’s mouth and replace her Melanie Griffith pucker-modulator with a legible speaking voice, we’d be cooking with gas.

A new commentary with genre experts Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Josh Nelson kicks off the special features. Lively, informed, and enthusiastically hyperbolic (Heller-Nicholas declares The Fall “perfect” and one of the great films of this young century), the two play off each other beautifully. They defend The Cell against charges that it’s derivative of The Silence of the Lambs and refer to multiple interviews with the film’s principal creators to bolster their points. They’re exceptional academics, both respected in their fields, and this is precisely the kind of commentary I find most useful. The pair touch on the fact that Protosevich modelled a lot of his original screenplay on A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and how, after Tarsem signed on, it became his film more than Protosevich’s. The schism within it that has prevented me from fully embracing The Cell has thus been clarified not by those who similarly dislike it, but by two smart people who like it very much indeed. That’s what it’s all about, and should be. An excellent yakker, in other words, one that I occasionally found myself talking back to, as one might in any good conversation. I learned a great deal.

Kay Lynch, founder of Salem Horror Fest, and Protosevich record a second commentary exclusive to this release. Lynch is a soothing presence, comfortable in their role as moderator for Protosevich, who proves himself an affable raconteur. He talks about MGM putting the script into turnaround and the security he felt working at New Line; about Tarsem’s love of the Namibian desert; and the relief that came with distancing himself from producers who wanted him to revise his script in destructive ways, including changing the sex of Lopez’s character. Another essential listen for the fan. On board as well is Tarsem’s film-length yakker from the 2000 DVD, and if you’ve never heard it before, you won’t regret the time investment. He picks The Cell apart, scene by scene, sometimes moment by moment. It gave me a new appreciation for his gifts despite only encouraging my read of him as a visual stylist in search of narrative anchors. He’s in good company in this regard, by the way. (Think fellow travellers Tim Burton and Ridley Scott.) At one point, he says he loves the Namibian desert and regrets using it up on the opening of The Cell because he wants to shoot a “small, personal project” there. He’s referring to The Fall, of course, and he apparently overcame his reluctance to repeat himself.

Tarsem sits for a more recent 90-minute interview titled Projection of the Mind’s Eye, dressed casually in a knit shirt and loose dungarees while displaying a healthily self-deprecating sense of humour. His thoughts on film and working in time rather than in the relative stasis of portraiture and sculpture are revelatory; he’d make an excellent teacher. He claims he’s obsessed with things from “Tarkovsky to porn to chess,” and…can relate. “There’s nothing unique about me, there’s a billion-point-two of me in India,” he offers as a way of explaining where his images come from, so anyone with even a basic sense of the iconography endemic to the various cultures in which he was raised could figure out his inspirations. “It’s so obvious,” Tarsem says of his work, and I have to admit, I’m charmed. “It’s hard for a guy who wants to make a visual film,” he adds, identifying precisely my problem with his movies. These supplements aren’t changing my mind, although they are making me feel charitable, nay, affectionate about what I see as The Cell‘s shortcomings. Tarsem is impossible to dislike. There’s a moment here where he talks about hiring triplets for a particularly striking sequence and panicking because, as right as they looked, they were not actors and kept blowing their lines. Tarsem recalls the producer saying, “Well, have them whispering,” which turned out to be the perfect solution, because in the act of whispering, their performances suddenly seemed compelling as opposed to merely terrible. Of course, as he’s telling this story, I’m recalling Jennifer Lopez’s wheezy/whispery strategy, and, well, draw your own conclusions.

Between Two Worlds (44 mins.) is another interview piece produced for this LE, this time with DP Phil Laufer, who is utterly charming. He reflects on his MTV origins–he has, incidentally, shot only music videos since The Cell–and making commercials with Tarsem. He remembers the director telling him, “I don’t care about the genre–this film has fantasy sequences. That’s what I care about.” He takes credit where it’s due and gives credit where appropriate. He admits he didn’t like the script, didn’t understand it, but once Tarsem explained what he wanted for the visuals, he was fully in. Laufer also reveals himself to be one of the pioneers of “digital into negative” shooting–that is, the transferring of a digital image onto a film negative. The entire set is frankly worth it for this story of the technology’s development, the sort of thing you won’t find anywhere else. I should mention that a “Director’s Cut” of the film, available via seamless branching, adds about two minutes to the running time. Despite a few extended shots of Carl jerking off over his first victim, there’s nothing notable or rewarding for the prurient among the extra footage. The second platter, a 1080p Blu-ray, evidently contains a version of the film reframed at 1.78:1 and regraded by Laufer with tools that weren’t available to him and Tarsem in 2000, plus four more interview featurettes, deleted scenes, special effects vignettes, trailers, and an image gallery. Arrow likewise failed to send us the accompanying booklet compiling writing from Heather Drain, Marc Edward Heuck, Josh Hurtado, and Virat Nehru. Fortunately, the first disc is a meal unto itself.

109 minutes; R; 2.39:1 (2160p/MPEG-H, Dolby Vision/HDR10); English 5.1 DTS-HD MA, English 2.0 LPCM; English SDH subtitles; BD-100 + BD-50; Arrow