Cypher stars Jeremy Northam as a meek businessperson who wants to get into corporate espionage. After passing the tests, the company he's hired by sends him to some conferences in some small big cities like Buffalo and Boise. As most noirish thrillers go though, Northam meets an alluring woman who may also be dangerous (Lucy Liu), and she lets him know that there's more going on than he thinks--the company is using him, and may eventually kill him. That leads Northam to trust Liu and to try to infiltrate the company so he can figure out what's going on. Will he find out in time? And if he does, will he get out alive?
This was really good, which made me wonder why it wasn't more widely know--and which was part of the reason why Tom wanted to cover it for the pod. Jeremy Northam is great as the noirish rube, and as the film takes its twists and turns, he navigates them really well. Then we have Liu as the Film Noir femme fatale, who also does a great job. From there, director Vincenzo Natali does really well in creating this future world that's almost like a liminal space, which creates a dreamlike quality to the proceedings that makes it even more mysterious, playing on the themes common in Film Noir but in a sci-fi setting. On top of that we have some great supporting performances from people like Nigel Bennett and David Hewlitt which really rounds out the film. There was a period between like 2000 and 2002 that felt like an extension of the 90s indie wave--which at the time didn't feel like an extension of anything, it felt like a natural continuation, but once we get Spider-Man, the first Harry Potter film, and the second Lord of the Rings film in 2002, things shift to more big tent, big budget projects, leaving films like this out--if you look at it, 2023 was the first year since 2002 that all of the top 3 box office earners weren't sequels in a franchise. In a way that may explain why this isn't as well-known as it should be, it probably should've come out five years earlier, but it definitely belongs with those other indie films of the 2000-2002 period. Either way, it's a great watch, and worth picking up.
As far as I could tell, the only other three Jeremy Northam films I'd seen were The Net, which I didn't really remember him in; and then The Golden Bowl and Gosford Park, both in that 2000-2002 indie period I described above, especially the latter, Gosford Park. The fact that he's such an accomplished dramatic actor is a huge plus for this film, as he's able to take the main character through all his metamorphoses and make the entire thing feel authentic. As much as it's needed in tense, exciting scenes, where he's in a violent confrontation or running for his life, it's also needed in the seemingly banal ones, where he's ordering a drink, or mixing with other people at the conventions. Yes, maybe you're more likely to see him in an adaptation of AS Byatt's Possession, but getting him in a film like this adds an additional layer that it really needed, and made the film that much better.
I was surprised to find out this was the first time we've had Lucy Liu on the site. Yes, she doesn't do many DTV flicks, but I thought we might have seen her in the old Wild Card posts I used to do; plus she did do some DTV stuff and near DTV stuff in the late 2000s, it just wasn't stuff I'd covered for the site--I also didn't realize that the show she was on, Elementary, ran for 7 seasons and over 150 episodes, which, with the kind of money she was making per episode, she could afford to be choosier and not have to slum it in the DTV world. Here it was a little more interesting, because 2002 was right in her big budget prime, in between the two Charlie's Angels films--though she also did another indie flick in that period, Mike Figgis's Hotel, so maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising. Also, this film allowed her to be the female lead, and even though Northam is the central character, she's right behind him with her role, so maybe that also intrigued her that she wasn't further down the pecking order like in Charlie's Angels or Kill Bill. She does a great job here, so if the role did intrigue her, she leaned into that, and a noirish film doesn't work if the Femme Fatale isn't good, so she had a big hand in making this picture what it was. In looking at her IMDb bio, I see her most recent live-action role was in Shazam! Fury of the Gods, which was one of the many superhero flops of 2023. I haven't seen it yet, so I don't know if it was really that bad--I didn't think The Marvels was as bad as its poor box office performance--but I think at the very least it shows how viable Liu still is as a star, so I don't think we can expect her in the DTV realm anytime soon. Either way, it was good to get her on the site finally.
The shot below is one of my favorites in the film. It's of a 300-story elevator that takes Northam's character to a bunker one of the companies has where they keep their most valuable information. Today that would all be done with computers, and while we know Vincenzo Natali didn't erect a 300-story elevator shaft for that shot, he did do it with practical effects and I think that helps it look better. I think that's an issue with modern DTV compared to its 80s and 90s brethren, back then they couldn't use computers--only in the 90s virtual reality movies, of course--but because they can now, studios are cutting budgets with the expectation that they will. Why blow up an intricate model of a helicopter, when you can recreate the whole thing on a computer for even less? Why pay the to use real fake blood, when we can recreate it for a fraction of the cost with the computer? In some cases I agree with it--if AIP had that technology, I would've preferred that to actors potentially getting hurt when explosions went off near them; and I especially want all big animals rendered in CGIs, leave those poor lions, tigers, bears, etc. alone and let them live in peace--but for something like this shot, or when we need to recreate blood, practical effects will always be superior.
Finally, David Hewlitt is in this film, and he's finally getting a tag. Why does that matter you ask? Because he was in our first ever DTVC review, Boa vs. Python, where I (lovingly) referred to him only as "the guy with glasses from Stargate: Atlantis." This is a great opportunity then to announce an initiative I've started on the site for 2024. Over the course of the year, I'm going to clean up all the old posts to remove the bad mattmovieguy links, and replace the Photobucket images (don't get me started on those thieving bastards) with direct Google uploads like I've been doing since I got back from hiatus in 2019. In some cases, like Boa vs. Python, because it's available on streaming, I've been able to grab new images, but still linking to the old image page; while others like The Breed, because it's not on a streaming site, it looks a little off because back then the screens I took were much smaller than they are now, so I'll be keeping an eye out for when they're available on streaming again so I can grab new images for them, and at the very least, the bad links and bad Photobucket pics have been removed. I'm going to try to handle a few posts a day, so that by the end of 2024, everything will be up to date. 2023 was a fantastic year for the site, so I want to lean into that in 2024 and focus more energy on fixing some of the long neglected issues, like the bad links and the Photobucket watermarked images, because a lot of the traffic has been coming from the old posts. We'll see how this goes, and from there work on some other projects, like reviving the clickable, alphabetical archive.
And with that, let's wrap this up. As best as I can tell, this is available to rent here in the States, and I think it's worth it. This is a great sci-fi noirish thriller, something from the early 2000s that feels like it could've been made in the 90s indie boom. Also check out the podcast episode I did with Tom Jolliffe in the podcast archives, and keep an eye out for his newest project, The Baby in the Basket. Finally, I want to thank everyone for making 2023 a great year here at the DTVC. I'm going to try to take this momentum and make 2024 even better. You can hold me to that!
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284978
And my newest novel, Don's House in the Mountains, is available now on Amazon! Click the image to buy.