25 Years Ago, The Cell Brought Visual Splendor to the New Line Cinema August Movie
A late-summer release from New Line Cinema in the back half of the ’90s used to mean a certain type of thing. At that time, grown-ups had plenty of space to themselves in the warm-weather months, with movies where teenagers and teenagers-at-heart could join in and watch. Nothing in Apollo 13 or Air Force One or The Client is wildly inappropriate for a younger crowd, and indeed, none of those movies are exactly obtuse–or get out of the way and wait for something more sensation-driven. That wait tended to terminate by the time late July and especially August rolled around, when it became the dirtbag’s time to shine. Mortal Kombat unofficially kicked off this Mountain Dew-adjacent mallrat renaissance, which continued with the likes of Spawn, Blade, and spiritually New Line movies like Event Horizon. From this perverse ritual frequently advertised on the backs of comic books emerged a movie about perverse rituals: Tarsem Singh’s The Cell, which may have inadvertently torched the New Line dirtbag-summer model 25 years ago.
On paper, The Cell is dirtbag Seven. David Fincher’s serial killer mood-soak was still a standard-bearing unexpected blockbuster from five years earlier, and The Cell threatened to go further in multiple directions: Further in depicting the ritualistic gruesomeness of its crimes, perpetrated against women, further in its pop psychology, and further in externalizing the mind of a killer via visually arresting nightmarescapes. Like Fincher, Tarsem (as he was credited at the time) was a veteran of ’90s music videos and TV commercials; the decade had been full of directors pulled from this world for big-screen demonstrations of slickness. He even had a future music-video star at his disposal: Jennifer Lopez, playing a psychologist who specializes in using advanced technology to share a kind of virtual-reality mind space with her patients. When Carl Stargher (Vincent D’Onofrio) is captured but rendered catatonic by his mental illness, unable to spill about the location of his most recent victim, Catherine Deane (Lopez) goes into his mind, confronts his demons, and tries to extract this crucial information, as haunted-looking FBI agent Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn) taps his foot impatiently.
So yeah, it sounds like an exploitation picture, and maybe it is. But Tarsem is the real deal, and so The Cell is too, kinda: lurid serial-killer hokum that locates genuine visual poetry in and outside of its killer’s headspace. It is the New Line August Movie both typified and elevated, which means it was readily available on snap-case Platinum Series DVD, probably used, probably for around five bucks, for years, and has now been re-released on a $40 special-edition 4K with three different cuts of the film. This is perhaps the way of things, but it feels particularly and appropriately extreme in the case of The Cell.
There are more prestigious movies that have yet to make it to 4K, for sure, but man, the beauty of Tarsem’s images is difficult to match, essentially extending the painterly moments of August New Line movies–Spawn’s impossibly billowing CG cape; the B-movie monsters at the edge of Mortal Kombat–across an entire canvas. Tarsem loves grand desertscapes and the supple grandeur of horses; one of the latter is memorably dissected in one unlikely trailer moment, and in that instance he does a shockingly good job of putting the audience into the killer’s place, observing the well-preserved carnage with a queasy mix of fascination and fright. Same goes for the movie’s most memorable real-world image, of Carl suspending himself from hooks sewn into his skin, stretching as it hangs down… nasty stuff, but the boundaries between reality and sicko fantasy stretch with it.
Tarsem’s transitions in and out of the mind, like a stunning dissolve from the folds of bedsheets into rolling sand dunes, boost the vividness of these semi-imaginary sequences even further, even if one of them pretty much just plays out his “Losing My Religion” video without the classic song. You can see why Roger Ebert, who loved to be drawn into a movie’s ornately beautiful visual schemes, awarded the film four stars, creating a kinship (at least among Ebert acolytes) between Tarsem and fellow oddball visualist Alex Proyas, who Ebert championed in his four-star reviews of both Dark City and Knowing. (Proyas and Tarsem even went on to make similarly wacked-out 300 riffs, and I’d rewatch either Immortals or Gods of Egypt before 300 any day.) There’s also a poetic New Line lineage at play; The Cell often plays like a Nightmare on Elm Street sequel unfolding in an art museum.
If The Cell is primarily a visual experience, at least that extends to its stars, too. Most of Lopez’s best performances, like her work in Out of Sight and Hustlers, connects her glamour to her Bronx-girl upbringing. Her beauty in these movies has more than a hint of flinty, street-smart athleticism. The Cell embraces her nascent pop-star appeal more directly, outfitting her in otherworldly and outlandishly gorgeous Eiko Ishioka costumes, leaning into the softness of her beauty rather than the sharper angles. It’s a beguiling glimpse of a different sort of movie star than the different flavor of Sandra Bullock she spent most of the 2000s trying to be (often quite successfully; The Wedding Planner, released five months after The Cell, was a bigger success in an even deadlier January slot). Vaughn, meanwhile, looks as if he’s preparing us for a twist where he turns out to be the killer’s accomplice. It’s not one of his better serious performances. (Doesn’t it feel like Tarsem should have been able to make more of his striking lankiness?) But Lopez brings more than enough humanity and iconography put together.
Lopez and Vaughn both went on to bigger, more crowd-pleasing movies. Tarsem’s career did not follow as predictable a path. The Cell was a hit, in precisely the big-opening-fast-dropping style of Mortal Kombat or Spawn–these movies pre-visioned the box office arc of the vast majority of superhero pictures that expanded the late-summer geek territory into the whole season, then the year-round calendar–and the director remained in-demand for music video and commercial work. He parlayed that into an unusual method of shooting far-flung locations for his follow-up The Fall, a highly personal and idiosyncratic power-of-storytelling fable about a suicidal stunt man and the little girl he befriends during a hospital stay. That movie took ages to make, and was barely released, though it’s only grown in stature since. Tarsem made a more traditional Hollywood fantasies with Immortals and Mirror, Mirror, less emotionally affecting but both gorgeous. Even his little-seen 2015 thriller Self/less has its moments. (I haven’t seen Dear Jassi, his well-reviewed romantic drama from 2023.)
As for New Line, it had a major dirtbag-summer blowout in 2003 with Freddy vs. Jason, but otherwise faltered a bit as other studios like Fox (Alien vs. Predator) and Sony’s Screen Gems (Ghosts of Mars) colonized that August space. Snakes on a Plane sounded a death knell of sorts, self-conscious about the internet cache that never really translated into proper mall-ticket box office. By the end of the decade, they completed the transition to Warner Bros. genre label, only releasing movies intermittently. Their recent Weapons feels like a throwback of sorts, but of course it’s too stately and ambitious in what it’s attempting to really fall in line with the grimier likes of Spawn. Then again, maybe The Cell was, too. If New Line Cinema is the House that Freddy Built, Tarsem’s film is an architectural marvel at the edge of the property.
Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.
