Tarsem Singh’s The Cell rings another hit for Indian-American filmmakers

Like Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, The Cell too revolves around the supernatural. It also has the horror and thriller elements of The Silence of the Lambs and the futurism of The Matrix. Add to it Tarsem Singh’s background as an MTV maverick, and it’s easy see why critics have been startled out of a slumberous summer in Hollywood.

The movie is set mainly in a kind of cerebral cyberspace. An intrepid child therapist (Jennifer Lopez) has to enter the mind of serial killer (Vincent D’Onofrio) in order to find where he has hidden his latest victim. The serial killer has gone into a coma following a seizure after stashing her away in a remote water chamber that will automatically fill up and snuff out her life.

What follows is a race against time thriller as Lopez uses an experimental neurological technique to literally get inside the brain of the temporarily comatose serial killer, while the FBI goes the regular route to find D’Onofrio’s latest victim before the killer wakes from his stupor.

The critics are divided. Some of them gave the film a pasting, calling it a visual excess with poor narrative. Others raved about the special effects.

“Eyes and synapses unschooled in the visual ellipsis and rapid-fire shorthand of the video age may find the hallucinatory and color-saturated sci-fi nail-biter too heavy on style and too light on substance. The heck with them, I say,” Washington Post‘s Michael Sullivan wrote. He argued that “Singh has fashioned such an original and stylish vision of insanity and filled it with such adrenalized, heart-stopping thrills that by the time the ocular numbness wears off it doesn’t really matter that we haven’t been anywhere — We’ve certainly seen someplace special.”

Singh is best known for his MTV music videos and ad spots for clients like Coca-Cola, Nike, Smirnoff, Anne Klien, Miller Lite beer, Lee and Levi’s jeans. The work that really catapulted him to fame was the surreal, quasi-religious video he made for the rock group R.E.M’s 1991 single Losing My Religion. The video, with sequences intercutting band members with shots of pre-Raphaelite models dressed as Christian models and angels, introduced artistitic elements of Italian painter Caravaggio and Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky to MTV.

The Cell too has similar moments, and is already beginning to attract frowns on that score. In one scene, Lopez appears as the Virgin Mary; in another, she’s wearing skimpy dominatrix gear.

“We are going to get a lot of stick for this,” the controversial actress told London Express. “There were days when I’d think, `Are we going to get away with this stuff?’ It’s very extreme.” In one particularly gruesome scene, killer D’Onofrio plays with his victims’ intestines. “People are going to be dead silent or laughing their asses off — or both — when they see that,” said Tarsem.

Little is known about Tarsem’s Indian background except that he was born there and come to the US at a young age. He is said to be a Hrvard MBA dropout who later studied art at Pasadena’s prestigious Art Center College of Design and film at Los Angeles City College. In India, he is best known for the Coke ad shot in front of Taj Mahal.

Critics are also divided over the performance of the controversial Jennifer Lopez, famous most recently for her Oscar night dress that was held together by a pin and a prayer. “Lopez is so beautiful that she would send most men into therapy, not out of it,” one reviewer wrote saltily on her role as a child therapist.

But it was film’s grisly aspects that drew the most flak. “When you think of summer at the movies, you think Goobers and popcorn. Until now. If the makers of this psychological thriller have their way, The Cell will have you reaching for a sick bag,” one Hollywood magazine wrote this weekend.

“We’re going to get a lot of s**t for this,” it quoted the film’s serial killer D’Onofrio as saying. “People are going to vomit. There were days where I’d think, `Are we going to get away with this stuff?”’

In interviews promoting the film, Tarsem agreed the material is very harsh and expected his ornate visual style will result in “a graphic opera about trying to understand the mind of a serial killer.”

“There’s no such thing as a subtle oper. I want the audience to know the cutting edge, and slice its hand with it,” he said.

The audience apparently did exactly that as some 4 million trooped into the multiplexes and rang up $17.2 million gross for the weekend.

That’s still chump change compared to the $300 million Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense raked in, but industry experts say with the kind of publicity this movie has got it could edge up to over $50 million. In fact, entertainment reporters point that The Cell marks the fifth consecutive No. 1 film starring a scientist or professor. Hollow Man was preceded by Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, What Lies Beneath and X Men.