''Cypher'' (also known as ''Brainstorm'' and ''Company Man'') is a 2002
science fiction
Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...
spy-fi thriller film directed by
Vincenzo Natali
Vincenzo Natali (born 1969) is an American-born Canadian film director and screenwriter, known for writing and directing science fiction and horror films such as ''Cube'', '' Cypher'', ''Nothing'', and '' Splice''.
Early life and education
Natal ...
and written by
Brian King. The film follows an accountant (
Jeremy Northam
Jeremy Philip Northam (born 1 December 1961) is an English actor. His film credits include '' The Net'' (1995), '' Emma'' (1996), '' An Ideal Husband'' (1999), '' Amistad'' (1997), ''The Winslow Boy'' (1999), ''Gosford Park'' (2001) and '' Eni ...
) whose sudden career as a
corporate spy takes an unexpected turn when he meets a mysterious woman (
Lucy Liu
Lucy Alexis Liu (; born December 2, 1968) is an American actress, producer, and artist. Widely regarded as a trailblazer for Asian Americans in arts and entertainment, Asian American representation in Hollywood, Los Angeles, Hollywood, she is t ...
), uncovering secrets about the nature of his work. The film was shown in limited release in theaters in the US and Australia, and released on DVD on August 2, 2005. The film received mixed reviews, and Northam received the Best Actor award at the
Sitges Film Festival
SITGES - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia () is an annual film festival held in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain. It specializes in fantasy film, fantasy, Horror film, horror and Cult film, cult films. Established in 1968, the festiva ...
.
Plot
Recently unemployed accountant Morgan Sullivan is bored with his
suburban
A suburb (more broadly suburban area) is an area within a metropolitan area. They are oftentimes where most of a metropolitan areas jobs are located with some being predominantly residential. They can either be denser or less densely populated ...
life. Pressured by his wife to take a job with her father's company, he instead pursues a position in
corporate espionage
Industrial espionage, also known as economic espionage, corporate spying, or corporate espionage, is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security.
While political espionage is conducted or orchestrat ...
. Digicorp's Head of Security, Finster, inducts Morgan and assigns him a new identity. As Jack Thursby, he is sent to
conventions to secretly record presentations and transmit them to headquarters. Sullivan is soon haunted by recurring
nightmares
A nightmare, also known as a bad dream, Retrieved 11 July 2016. is an unpleasant dream that can cause a strong emotional response from the mind, typically fear but also despair, anxiety, disgust or sadness. The dream may contain situations o ...
and neck pain.
At a bar, Morgan meets Rita Foster from a competing corporation, who offers him pills and tells him not to transmit at the next convention. Afterward, Morgan is surprised when Digicorp confirms the receipt of his non-existent transmission. He takes the pills Rita gave him and his nightmares and pains stop. Confused and intrigued by Rita, he arranges to meet with her again. She tells him about Digicorp's deception and offers him an antidote – a green liquid in a large
syringe
A syringe is a simple reciprocating pump consisting of a plunger (though in modern syringes, it is actually a piston) that fits tightly within a cylindrical tube called a barrel. The plunger can be linearly pulled and pushed along the inside ...
. Morgan hesitantly accepts. She warns him that no matter what happens at the next convention he must not react.
Morgan discovers that all the convention attendees believe themselves to be Digicorp spies. While they are drugged from the served drinks, plastic-clad scientists probe, inject and brainwash them. Individual headsets reinforce their new identities, preparing them to be used and then disposed of. Morgan manages to convince Digicorp that he believes his new identity. He is then recruited by Sunway Systems, a rival of Digicorp. Sunway's Head of Security, Callaway, encourages Morgan to act as a
double agent
In the field of counterintelligence, a double agent is an employee of a secret intelligence service for one country, whose primary purpose is to spy on a target organization of another country, but who is now spying on their own country's organi ...
, feeding corrupted data to Digicorp. Morgan calls Rita, who warns him that Sunway is equally ruthless, and that he is in fact being used by Rita's boss, Sebastian Rooks. Morgan manages to steal the required information from Sunway Systems'
vault, escaping with Rita's help.
Rita ultimately takes him to meet Rooks. When she temporarily leaves the room, a nervous Morgan calls Finster, and becomes even more distressed. He accidentally shoots Rita, who encourages him to ignore her and meet Rooks in the room next door. Morgan finds the room filled with objects which appear to be personal to him, including a
photograph
A photograph (also known as a photo, or more generically referred to as an ''image'' or ''picture'') is an image created by light falling on a photosensitivity, photosensitive surface, usually photographic film or an electronic image sensor. Th ...
of him and Rita together. Realising that he is apparently Rooks, he turns to Rita in disbelief.
Before Rita can convince him, the apartment is invaded by armed men. Rita and Morgan escape to the roof of the skyscraper as the security teams of Digicorp and Sunway meet, led by Finster and Callaway. After a short
Mexican standoff both sides realise they are after the same person, Sebastian Rooks, and rush to the roof, where they find Morgan and Rita in a helicopter. Rita cannot fly it, but, having designed it himself, Sebastian can after Rita encourages him to remember his past self, connecting through his love for her. He lifts off amid gunfire from the security teams. Finster and Callaway comment as the couple seem to have escaped:
:Callaway: "Did you get a look at him? Did you see Rooks' face?"
:Finster: "Just Morgan Sullivan, our pawn."
Looking up, they see the helicopter hovering and realise, too late, the true identity of Morgan Sullivan. Sebastian triggers a bomb, causing the whole roof to explode. On a boat in the South Pacific Ocean, Sebastian reveals the content of the stolen disc to Rita. Marked "
terminate with extreme prejudice
Project GAMMA was the name given in 1968 to Detachment B-57, Company E (Special Operations), 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) (5th SFG(A)) in Vietnam from 1967 to 1970. It was responsible for covert intelligence collection operations in Ca ...
", it is the last copy of Rita's identity (after the one in the vault was destroyed). Sebastian throws the disc into the sea and says, "Now there's no copy at all."
Cast
Reception
The film received mixed reviews. On review aggregator
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is an American review aggregator, review-aggregation website for film and television. The company was launched in August 1998 by three undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley: Senh Duong, Patrick Y. Lee ...
, the film holds a 58% rating based on reviews from 19 critics.
Derek Elley of ''
Variety
Variety may refer to:
Arts and entertainment Entertainment formats
* Variety (radio)
* Variety show, in theater and television
Films
* ''Variety'' (1925 film), a German silent film directed by Ewald Andre Dupont
* ''Variety'' (1935 film), ...
'' called the film "consistently intriguing" and "100% plot driven" with excellent performances from the cast,
while
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is a British public service broadcaster headquartered at Broadcasting House in London, England. Originally established in 1922 as the British Broadcasting Company, it evolved into its current sta ...
's Neil Smith compared ''Cypher'' to ''
The Manchurian Candidate
''The Manchurian Candidate'' is a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959. It is a political thriller about the son of a prominent U.S. political family who is brainwashed into being an unwitting assassin for a communist conspiracy. T ...
'', and noticed feelings of tension and claustrophobia, as in Natali's directorial début ''
Cube
A cube or regular hexahedron is a three-dimensional space, three-dimensional solid object in geometry, which is bounded by six congruent square (geometry), square faces, a type of polyhedron. It has twelve congruent edges and eight vertices. It i ...
'', finally concluding that "Natali his yarn in an Orwellian atmosphere of paranoia."
Scott Weinberg, reviewing for
DVD Talk
DVD Talk is a home video news and review website launched in 1999 by Geoffrey Kleinman.
History
Kleinman founded the site in January 1999 in Beaverton, Oregon. Besides news and reviews, it features information on hidden DVD features known as ...
, recommended the film, calling it "one of the best direct-to-video titles
e hasseen all year", noting similarities to ''
The Matrix
''The Matrix'' is a 1999 science fiction film, science fiction action film written and directed by the Wachowskis. It is the first installment in the The Matrix (franchise), ''Matrix'' film series, starring Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, Ca ...
'', ''
Dark City'' and the works of
Philip K. Dick.
English horror fiction writer and journalist
Kim Newman
Kim James Newman (born 31 July 1959) is an English journalist, film critic, and fiction writer. He is interested in film history and horror fiction – both of which he attributes to seeing Tod Browning's ''Dracula'' at the age of eleven & ...
, writing for the ''
Empire
An empire is a political unit made up of several territories, military outpost (military), outposts, and peoples, "usually created by conquest, and divided between a hegemony, dominant center and subordinate peripheries". The center of the ...
'' magazine, awarded the film 4 out of 5 stars, praising Northam's and Liu's performances and calling the film a "semi-science-fictional exercise in puzzle-setting and solving".
Some critics found problems with the film's complex narrative. Paul Byrnes of ''
The Sydney Morning Herald
''The Sydney Morning Herald'' (''SMH'') is a daily Tabloid (newspaper format), tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, Australia, and owned by Nine Entertainment. Founded in 1831 as the ''Sydney Herald'', the ''Herald'' is the oldest continuous ...
'' found that the plot overwhelmed the characters so much that he "stopped caring".
[Byrnes, Paul (August 14, 2003)]
Cypher review
Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Retrieved 2010-07-25. John J. Puccio, writing for ''Movie Metropolis'', thought that "
'Cypher''scorporate espionage plot doesn't prove simply too complicated, it ends up downright muddled", but concluded that the film was nevertheless "still kind of fun".
For his performance in ''Cypher'', Jeremy Northam received the Best Actor award on the 2002
Sitges Film Festival
SITGES - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia () is an annual film festival held in Sitges, Catalonia, Spain. It specializes in fantasy film, fantasy, Horror film, horror and Cult film, cult films. Established in 1968, the festiva ...
in
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community of Spain, designated as a ''nationalities and regions of Spain, nationality'' by its Statute of Autonomy of Catalonia of 2006, Statute of Autonomy. Most of its territory (except the Val d'Aran) is situate ...
.
References
External links
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cypher
2002 films
2000s science fiction thriller films
2000s spy films
American science fiction thriller films
Canadian science fiction thriller films
English-language Canadian films
Films about memory erasure and alteration
Films about computing
Films scored by Michael Andrews
Films directed by Vincenzo Natali
Cyberpunk films
Fiction about mind control
American spy films
Films about accountants
2000s English-language films
2000s American films
2000s Canadian films
English-language science fiction thriller films