The Cell

Just when you thought that The Silence of the Lambs and its anaemic imitators had wrung the last drops of blood out of the serial killer genre, along comes this eyeball-searing, eardrum-punishing variation: a wild, hallucinatory trip inside the damaged mind of murderer Carl Stargher (D'Onofrio). The delirious symbolism and extravagant beauty of these surreal mindscapes are not matched, however, by the creaking script's daft contrivances and lack of clock-ticking suspense. Lopez is hard to take as the empathetic psychologist who uses a synaptic transfer machine to penetrate the comatose killer's tortured psyche in hopes of finding his latest victim. That said, victim-to-be Subkoff succeeds against the odds in fleshing out her nightmarish ordeal (trapped in a glass tank filling with water) by capturing the various stages of disbelief, anger and despair.