The Cell is likely to be pretty creepy for most people. It's disturbing, unsettling and not recommended for anyone trying to avoid nightmares. On the other hand if you want your nightmares to be visually rich and extravagant then The Cell is just the shot. This is a remarkably effective and inventive film.

And there's a lot to discover. Suffice it to say that one mind travels into another, into another person's imagination, and if that person is an ugly serial killer well then the environment isn't likely to be all that >supportive.

An institution has been suspending a therapist called Catherine (Jennifer Lopez) and her mentally withdrawn client from wires. Their minds are connected such that the therapist can attempt to make contact and effect a cure.

Meanwhile a serial killer (Vincent D'Onofrio) is brought in. He's in a coma. He's got a trapped woman in a container, a cell, and she's going to soon die if she's not found. The therapist takes a big breath and visits this "bad man's" mind. We need to rescue his latest victim. We need to!

Here we have something of a mixture of Silence Of The Lambs, The Matrix and Seven but newcomer director Tarsem (with writer Mark Protosevich) move The Cell smartly into new territory, especially visually.

Film is the ideal medium to investigate imagination and to look at madness. After all, at the movies we're looking at other people's mental images. It just depends on how courageous, how surreal those people are, and how resistant the filmakers are to the blandness that envelops popular film making.

And it's not bland if the film becomes personal. There are two little boys in The Cell, both trapped in very bad dreams. The therapist offers help, friendship, but a horror is always just a blink, a mind shake away.

The killer preys on women, as well as little boys and there they are in his dream world, a universe where he can do just what he wants. At one stage he lopes up, slowly, out of his violently hued dream world and grabs the little boy, and at that moment I was convinced that I'd had that sort of nightmare years ago.

And in real life there's the woman trapped in the cell. She's to be slowly drowned. A man is drawn, his intestines slowly pulled out of him.

The Cell is utterly memorable in spite of a weak bend at the knees in its final few moments but the film makers were probably right. They did need to wake their audience out of their nightmare, send them forth into a world where we know that if we get impaled on a sword, it's real.

4 Creeped Out Flys