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CYPHER
8/10
aka Company
Man : USA (USA/Canada?) 2003 (made 2002) : Vincenzo NATALI : 96 mins
The movie made
as Company Man underwent a change of identity some time after filming
ended, emerging as the more mysterious-sounding Cypher – a one-word
title, just like director Natali’s last movie, cult favourite Cube
(1997). No-one actually mentions the word ‘cypher’ in Cypher,
however: it means “a person or thing of no importance”, or rather a person
or thing with no solid identity of their own.
Such as Morgan
Sullivan (Jeremy Northam), a somewhat geeky-nerdy, even Forrest Gumpish
chap who, as the film begins, is applying to work at Digicorp – a shadowy
near-future organisation whose main rival is the equally shadowy Sunways.
Sullivan gets the job – which involves passing himself off as ‘Jack Thursby’
and engaging in some low-level corporate espionage against Sunways. But
before long, Sullivan finds himself lost in a paranoid world where nothing
and nobody are quite what they seem…
 To
say any more would be extremely unfair – Cypher (memorably described
on a French website as ‘un thriller cerebro-futuriste ambitieux)
is meticulously constructed as a head-spinning mind-fuck of a movie,
surpassing even John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998) for the sheer
number of audacious twists and turns along the way. Of course, Natali
and scriptwriter Brian King aren’t breaking too much new ground here –
critics and audiences alike will have plenty of fun ticking off the nods
and winks to the countless cinematic and literary forebears: the first
half-hour, so drained of colour as to be almost monochrome, strongly recalls
the dystopian vision of Spielberg’s Minority
Report, and Philip K Dick is perhaps the most obvious point of
reference.
Readers of
a semi-forgotten Vladimir Nabokov novel will, however, have the biggest
head start – but this review won’t spoil the fun by naming which one.
Likewise, the casting of Jeremy Northam as Sullivan (whose name combines
Preston Sturges’ Miracle of Morgan’s Creek and Sullivan’s
Travels) is, as anyone who knows anything about the actor will
eventually realise, brilliantly witty – but, again, you’ll have to find
out why for yourself.
 It’s
no spoiler, however, to say that Northam handles the nightmarishly difficult
role of Sullivan – whose character slowly executes a 360 degree personality
change – with terrific aplomb. King and Natali provide him with a worthy
framework in which to operate, nimbly avoiding the perils that might easily
have capsized lesser talents. Namely (1) that ‘echoes’ of previous books
and movies could have turned Cypher into something of a cypher
itself, (2) that the clever plot could have tipped over into the unfortunate
and very different realm of the ‘clever-clever’ and (3) that the futuristic
production design could have overwhelmed the more pressing concerns of
character and story.
The avoidance
of these hazards mean it’s crucially always possible to work out what’s
going on and why, and there is sufficient deadpan humour along the way
to ensure we never bog down into the portentousness that mars most bigger-budget
excursions into the near future: Natali may not be any kind of Preston
Sturges, but you will laugh out loud when Sullivan gets to the
top of the ladder. To say any more, however…
27th
May, 2003
(seen 24th May 2003: National
Museum of Photography, Film and Television, Bradford – Fantastic Films
Weekend)
by Neil
Young
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