There’s lots more–and worse–carnage in “The Cell”, a movie in which “M” doesn’t just stand for murder, but mutilation too. The film, which opens this weekend, stars Jennifer Lopez as a child psychologist who journeys into the mind of captured, comatose serial killer Stargher to pry out the location of his last victim. Inside his mind she finds a terrifying dream-world complete with mannequin corpses performing sex acts, a dismembered horse and a host of other awful images.
The twisted images and barrage of body torture are the brain child of Singh, an acclaimed director of television commercials and music videos. He chose “The Cell” for his film directorial debut, he says, because it was “a blank canvas.” A movie about what goes on inside someone’s head gave him unparalleled artistic freedom as director. “No writer can write what I need to film in there,” Singh told Newsweek.
As a result, the creepy mind of Stargher can be traced back to the creative mind of Singh. A jovial, Indian-born, Harvard Business School dropout, Singh is hardly the serial killer type. He laughs at the idea that Stargher’s thoughts are in any way connected to his own thought, or anyone else’s. “If anybody thinks that’s how we dream,” he says, “they should have their head examined.” Singh says that the movie is far from reality, “it’s opera, it’s theatrical. It’s much larger than life and that’s exactly what I intended.”
To create his theater of the disturbed, Singh defied convention and looked to a world of color. The “obvious way” to create a killer’s mind was to " stay dark and claustrophobic," he says. But the director felt that using traditional settings would make it hard for him to hold people’s attention. So he chose the opposite of expectation, filling Stargher’s dream-world with psychedelic samurais and clothing Lopez in bright, billowing gowns. The result is a world as hallucinogenic as Alice in Wonderland, but on more of a bad trip. Singh believes this “kitschy” arena is scary precisely because “when you go into that territory you don’t expect gore… There’s something very disturbing about dark images seen in bright backgrounds.”
Defying convention also helped him make a gruesome genre film “acceptable” for a large audience. “If I’d gone for the [traditional] set-up, the censors or anybody else wouldn’t have let me get away with this stuff because it’s too real,” says Singh. “How you get past that is by going into something really kitschy.” Violence taking place in front of flowers may take it out of real life, but Singh says it’s still shocking. If anything, he says, “it’s more disturbing.”
The question for Singh and New Line, the studio that put big money and a big star into the film, is whether audiences will find it too disturbing. “What I originally turned in in the rough cut was a lot more graphic and a lot more gross and people were really offended by it.” He says that it took a second look to find a level of gore that would work for American audiences. “The European version has more, it’s more graphic,” he says. “And the Japanese want more and I don’t have any more to give them…different people will draw their tolerance lines at different levels.”
The director dismisses the notion that his personal tolerance level for violence is higher than most people’s. “I would say it’s the other way around,” he says. “Things that other people don’t find disturbing, I find very disturbing.” He points to scenes of “someone walking into a building and shooting up the place. You see that all the time on television. I find that disturbing.”
American audiences, used to bullet-ridden, instant death thrillers, may be shocked by the “The Cell”, a film with plenty of corpses but only five bullets. And as Singh points out, “those bullets are used to save somebody.” It’s unclear whether large audiences can handle the movie’s feast of mauled flesh. But for Singh, at least, the gap between fact and film is big enough to leave him undisturbed. “I’ve never had a sleeping problem my entire life,” he says, “never had nightmares.” And the audience? “If it gives them nightmares, well, that’s why they go and see these things.”
