The Cell. 2000. USA. Directed by Tarsem Singh Dhandwar. Screenplay by Mark Protosevich. With Jennifer Lopez, Vince Vaughn, Vincent D’Onofrio, Dylan Baker, Marianne Jeanne-Baptiste. Costume design by April Napier, Eiko Ishioka. DCP. 107 min.
The world was not prepared for Tarsem’s feature debut, in which FBI Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) recruits a child psychologist named Catherine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) to enter the psyche of a comatose serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) in a race against time to rescue his latest kidnapping victim. The filmmaker has said he was drawn to the idea of the mind as a grand stage, and his widescreen vision of the subconscious is untrustworthy, nightmarish, and beautiful; it’s no surprise Catherine gets lost in this mutating labyrinth of repressed traumas. But the outside world depicted is no less claustrophobic, a forbidding place of failed experiments and broken families. Crucial to the film's visual panache are the indelible costumes from April Napier and Eiko Ishioka (Bram Stoker’s Dracula), as well as a landscape that spans the Barcelona Pavilion and deserts of both Namibia and the American southwest. About the film’s uncompromising aesthetic, Tarsem told the New York Post, “One day I will do my version of My Dinner with Andre, but now I feel like having fun.”