CYPHER

Reviewed By: Paul Mount

Starring: Jeremy Northam, Lucy Lui, David Hewlett, Anne Marie Scheffler, Matthew Sharp,

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Well there go ninety-five minutes of my life I'll never get back. Director Vincenzo Natali made quite a splash a couple of years ago with his claustrophobic, nightmarish SF thriller CUBE. Sadly he's hit his head on the diving board with this dreary and utterly uninvolving hi-tech fantasy espionage thriller which is probably the most tedious cinematic experience I've endured since THE USUAL SUSPECTS (yawn).

The plot involves Morgan Sullivan (a nice, out-of-his-depth performance by Northam, the film's only strength) who is a bit tired of his dull accountancy job and his nagging wife. When he's offered the chance to get involved in some fancy industrial espionage he wanders into a bizarre and rather uninteresting brainwashing scheme where he begins to question not only his own identity but the very nature of identity itself. Who's who? Who can you trust? Who's double cross