The Cell (2000)

Tarsem Singh arrived from the world of music videos with a debut feature that treats the human skull as a venue for opera. The Cell sends a psychotherapist into the comatose mind of a serial killer, and that mind is furnished with bisected horses, floating glass panels, and a desert the color of dried blood. It is a film of enormous visual confidence and modest narrative patience. Roger Ebert loved it. Most everyone else shrugged at the plot and stared at the wallpaper.

Jennifer Lopez carries the lead as the doctor, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste sits at a monitor as one of the scientists. Neither fact is announced, underlined, or explained to the audience. In 2000 this passed without remark, which is its own quiet data point. The story concerns a killer who was himself a victim, and it asks whether compassion is owed to a man who has done dreadful things. The screenplay poses the question and then declines to answer it, which spares us a closing monologue about the cycle of abuse. The climactic image of the doctor as a Marian figure cradling a drowning child is strange, gorgeous, and theologically unaffiliated.

Seen from the present day, the film reads as a relic of a moment when a genre thriller could be visually extravagant and morally unresolved at once. There is no sermon here, no checklist, no lesson imposed upon the audience. Just a glass box filling with water, and a woman deciding what mercy costs. It opened at number one and returned its budget three times over. The culture has since moved toward more explicit instruction, and this film's refusal to instruct now looks like a virtue.