The work of Philip K. Dick casts a long shadow over Cube director Vincenzo Natali’s second futuristic feature, which stars suave English actor Jeremy Northam (Emma, Enigma) as Morgan Sullivan, a nerdy American accountant hired as an industrial spy by Digicorp. Leaving behind his dull, suburban life, Sullivan adopts the alias Jack Thursby, a whisky-drinking womaniser who smokes almost as much as he talks. But his confident new identity disintegrates when he falls for sexy, enigmatic rival Rita (Lucy Liu) and finds that he is merely
an expendable cog inside a ruthless corporate machine. Cast adrift in a shiny, shifting world of faceless corporations, cryptic conspiracies and dangerous femmes fatale, Sullivan/Thursby loses his tenuous grip on reality and spirals downwards into paranoia. Intelligent, hardcore, conceptual science fiction, Cypher is everything that true Philip K. Dick adaptations such as Total Recall, Impostor and Minority Report might have been.