You wouldn’t necessarily expect to revisit a Jennifer Lopez horror movie from the year 2000 and discover that it’s pretty great, but here we are. The Cell is pretty great, you guys.
When it was released back in August 2000, Tarsem Singh‘s The Cell wasn’t exactly a big time hit with critics, but it did have one unlikely ally in its corner: Roger Ebert. Unlikely, I note, because Ebert was notoriously unkind to horror films throughout his career, making no secret of the fact that he wasn’t the genre’s biggest champion. But Ebert took to The Cell, going so far as to label it “one of the best films of the year.”
The late Roger Ebert wrote in his August 2000 review, “We live in a time when Hollywood shyly ejects weekly remakes of dependable plots, terrified to include anything that might confuse the dullest audience member. Into this wilderness comes a movie like The Cell, which is challenging, wildly ambitious and technically superb.”
Indeed The Cell is all of these things, a visually sumptuous horror movie that unquestionably served as an influence on everything from Bryan Fuller’s “Hannibal” to Ryan Murphy’s “American Horror Story.” In the film, Jennifer Lopez plays a sort of new age Clarice Starling as Catherine Deane, a social worker who is quite literally able to enter the minds of comatose persons thanks to an experimental technology that links brains and shares feeds. Deane’s next patient? Twisted serial killer Carl Stargher (a brilliantly unnerving Vincent D’Onofrio), whose sleeping mind is a memory palace filled with nightmarish delights. The goal? To find his next victim, a young woman who will soon drown inside of Stargher’s automated torture device.
The most common criticism of The Cell, both when it was released and still 18 years later, is that it’s a case of style over substance, and one thing about the film is for certain: it’s oozing with style, so much so that it edges on the precipice of being a full-on art film when it expands beyond its crime thriller trappings. The film’s set-up suggests a familiar approach, with the FBI tracking down a demented killer, but The Cell really comes alive whenever it plunges headfirst into that killer’s mind. At its boldest points, and its comfortable being bold most of its runtime, The Cell is way more Nightmare on Elm Street than it is Silence of the Lambs, with breathtaking set design and costuming ensuring that the style *is* the substance.
The Cell is loaded with no shortage of unforgettable nightmare imagery, much of it inspired by famous works of art, with various different versions of Carl Stargher lurking around every corner of that nightmarescape as a sort of Freddy Krueger for a new generation. At some points, Stargher appears to Catherine as an frightened child, while other forms represent an idealized version of himself that it is at times regal and at others downright demonic. D’Onofrio absolutely owns the role no matter which version of the character he’s tasked with playing, turning Stargher into one of the strongest horror villains of that time.
And make no mistake, though the style of The Cell is the primary calling card that elevates it to being a standout horror film of the early 2000s, it’s not as bereft of substance as many would lead you to believe. Underneath all the vividly alluring nightmare fuel and dream logic lies a story of an abused young boy turned into a monster by his own father, and the woman who’s desperately trying to contact the goodness within him in an attempt to save the life of his next victim. By the time Catherine “reverses the feed” and pulls Carl into an imaginary world of her own creation, bravely butchering one of his demonic forms like a total badass while taking on an angelic form herself to drown the young version of Carl and free him from his own mind, it’s clear that Tarsem Singh wasn’t solely interested in showing you pretty pictures. Monsters aren’t born but created, and The Cell‘s final act slays its beast in touching fashion.
Sure, The Cell would be little more than an “FBI hunts serial killer” tale if stripped of its particular brand of style, but the fact remains that Tarsem Singh’s visionary flourishes are there and on full display, taking that procedural familiarity to a whole new level by merging it with a different sort of movie entirely. By Singh’s own description, The Cell is horror opera; it’s big, bold and impossible to ignore, perhaps even moreso in 2018 than when it came out.
