Just Say No to Abuse Declaring War on Terrorism. 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. There he tortures and eventually drowns them, videotaping all the while. 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. In this case, the mind is that of a boy with the same form of schizophrenia as Stargher.