Cypher (2002)

Vincenzo Natali's Cypher arrives from 2002, a year when a paranoid thriller about corporations erasing and reassembling a man's identity could still be enjoyed as a puzzle and not a position paper. Jeremy Northam plays Morgan Sullivan, an accountant so bored by suburban life that he signs on with Digicorp and is promptly renamed, re-drugged, and repurposed. The film is plot driven to its bones, which is a polite way of saying the characters exist to be moved around a board. The board is handsome. The atmosphere is Orwellian, the corridors are fluorescent, and the twists keep arriving with the grim punctuality of a commuter train.

Lucy Liu appears as Rita Foster, the mysterious woman who dispenses pills and warnings in equal measure, and her presence lends the proceedings a cool, watchful energy the screenplay never quite earns. She is a femme fatale of the classical school: competent, cryptic, and ultimately a device for the hero's self-discovery. The film's politics live in its attitude toward corporate power, and they are the paranoid, atmospheric kind. Digicorp and Sunway Systems brainwash their operatives, use them, then mark them for disposal. That is a critique of the boardroom, delivered through genre mechanics instead of speeches, and it lands with more force for never raising its voice.

What keeps Cypher from the sermonizing of a later era is its total indifference to instruction. It wants to trick you, not improve you. The film has no interest in racial politics, no environmental conscience, and no thesis about the body or the mind in any contemporary sense. Memory loss here is a plot device, not a condition to be honored. Rita is capable, but she is a plot device too. The result is a lean, chilly contraption that respects the audience enough to confuse it, then asks nothing afterward but a shrug. In the present climate, that reticence reads almost as a virtue.