Feed Your Head-- with "The Cell"

If we're honest, most of us will admit to having at one time or another wanted to be able to see inside someone else's head, to know what they're thinking or what motivates them. This is to warn you that watching The Cell is likely to cure you of that particular wish for a long time.

Surrealism is a difficult style to handle in film. It isn't conducive to easy interpretation, and yet a film audience has to be able to grasp the essentials or you lose them. Director Tarsem Singh, making his feature debut with this exercise in that very style, manages to maintain the perfect balance between what is and what isn't so that the twisted world inside Carl Stargher's head never drifts too far from what we are able to understand and interpret.

Bear in mind: the basic storyline here is only a frame for the real one, the moments when we slip into Stargher's mind. Stargher (Vincent D'Onofrio) is a serial killer who kidnaps his victims and locks them into a glass cage. There he tortures and eventually drowns them, videotaping all the while.

FBI Agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) has finally identified Stargher, but too late. Stargher suffers from a rare form of virally-induced schizophrenia, and he has gone into a deep, irreversible coma with the whereabouts of his last victim buried there with him. Still, there is one final hope for rescuing the woman: an experimental program that allows psychological social worker Catharine Deane (Jennifer Lopez) to literally send her consciousness into another mind. In this case, the mind is that of a boy with the same form of schizophrenia as Stargher.

In the end, (and this is not a spoiler. Like I said, the basic storyline is just there for the sake of continuity) it is "simple police work" that finds Stargher's last victim. What matters, however, is that in the meantime we have taken a wild ride through the mind of a man who is not only warped almost beyond humanity but divided. In the process, we discover just how narrow the border can be between madness and sanity, and how easily any one of us might step across it.

Although the rest of the cast do what they can with what they have to work with, there's no question that the force to be reckoned with here is D'Onofrio. His Carl Stargher truly walks a knife's edge, and D'Onofrio never loses control. There is a sense throughout his entire performance of a massive accumulation of rage that goes beyond even what he is allowed to

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