Cypher (2002)

Vincenzo Natali's second feature (after 1997's CUBE) gets a digital release from Signature Entertainment.

Morgan Sullivan (Jeremy Northam) gets a job working as a corporate spy for DigiCorp. He is assigned a new name and identity & is instructed to record all the talks at the conferences he is sent to attend so they can be sent back to the company. During one such set of meetings he meets Rita (Lucy Liu) in a hotel bar. Later she waylays him and gives him medication that allows him to see 'the truth', that the conference talks themselves are a cover for yet more brainwashing.

Morgan ends up at a rival company who recruit him as a double agent to spy on DigiCorp but the real prize apparently lies in 'The Vault' - a vast underground repository of information into which he is sent with a special coded disc. But who can he actually trust, and is he even actually Morgan Sullivan?

Set in the same kind of late 1990s / early 2000s SF - type world as films like Andrew Niccol's GATTACA (albeit with a somewhat lower budget), Vincenzo Natali's CYPHER offers a Philip K Dick-inspired plot where no-one, least of all the central character, knows exactly what's going on and how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together until the climax.

It's all entertaining stuff, with a tactility to its technology (discs frequently being slipped into sleek CD readers, physical documents being passed in secret) that would be lacking from anything made today. Northam, best known at the time for period dramas, makes for an engaging hero and David Hewlett from CUBE pops up in a supporting role. Here's the trailer:

Vincenzo Natali's CYPHER is on digital release from Signature Entertainment now