Cypher

*** Contains spoilers ***

Well-written and thoroughly absorbing sci-fi thriller, about a man caught-up in espionage between two rival computer-firms in the near-future.

Jeremy Northam plays everyman Morgan Sullivan, who passively finds a way to take breaks from his oppressive marriage by secretly becoming a spy for Digicorp. It's the perfect opportunity for him to live a double-life and play-around with dreaming-up a new identity for himself.

His job is easy – get flown around America to secretly audio-record events at meetings that he's perfectly entitled to be present at. You or I could do that, making Morgan easy to identify with. The trickiest part is explaining it all away to his wife.

Then he discovers that the audio-recorder / microtransmitter that he's been issued with has, all along, been a dud.

So... Digicorp must be flying him to all these meetings for another, private, reason then. But what?

When he discovers what is actually taking place, but still not why, he has to muster all that passivity he's so good at just to remain unnoticed and stay alive.

Then the only way out becomes to instead passively trust Digicorp's competitors. And so it goes on, as poor Morgan realises that there is just no escape from the enormous mindgames of the ever-multiplying factions around him, all of whom are so keen for him to continue playing-along with their equally-powerful competitors. He can't trust anyone, but he has to remain loyal to one of them.

There's so much twisting, turning, and rewriting of everything that's happened so far in this, that what impressed me more than anything else about this film was that I actually kept track of it all! That's quite a big complement I'm paying there to the writer – Brian King - and the director – Vincenzo Natali.

Natali's more famous work is Cube, which didn't quite all follow-through for me. As a result, this is automatically better.

There are probably holes in the plot that I haven't noticed, but until I do, this gets a 9.5.

Not a zero.