The Mutating Cell

 The eponymous Celda 211 (Cell 211) of the Prison Central Provincial in the Spanish city of Zamora has a certain reputation among the prison’s inmates. Its last occupant, Morao, who had a tumour in his brain ‘the size of a kiwi’, spent his last days in there in the throes of unimaginable pain, all the while screaming for help. But his cries were never answered by the prison guards. However, the walls were eager listeners, on which Morao, ignored, impaired, and in suffering, had inscribed barely intelligible words that bear testament to his agonising last few days. Possibly because of the way in which he died, the cell is now kept empty, but a sense of foreboding prevails within. Maybe, the vacancy is also explained by the fact that El Morao in Spanish means ‘he dwells’?

Though the above description is more befitting of a horror film, but Daniel Monzón’s eight Goya (the Spanish equivalent to the Oscars) winning Celda 211 (2009) is in reality an exceptional prison drama that unfolds against this setting. 

When the unconscious 33-year-old Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann) finds himself being slapped back to reality in that very cell, he is quite oblivious of its morbid past. In fact, he is not supposed to be inside a prison cell in the first place. All he knows is that he has been employed as a guard at the Prison Central Provincial—a job he was supposed to join the day after. Leaving his wife, Elena (Marta Etura), who is six-months pregnant, at home, he had decided to pay his new employers a visit a day before his first working day, just to see ‘how things work’. He was being shown around by his two colleagues Armando and Germán, when an explosion occurred and he lost consciousness.

It does not take the groggy Juan too long to understand that he is in the middle of a nightmarish scenario—a riot, led by the raspy-voiced, bald-headed, life-sentence-serving Felipe Gonzalez, popularly referred to as Malamadre (slang for ‘bad mother’), has broken out. Before long, he is dragged in front of Malamadre (played impeccably by Luis Tosar). Juan realises, to his utter horror, that to survive, he has no other option but to win over the trust and confidence of Malamadre and his cronies by making them believe that he is one of them—a fellow inmate.

In a world where a handmade musket, built out of pipes and spring, is worse than its actual counterpart; where a spoon doubles up as a lethal weapon; and justice is often meted out with iron rods, Juan knows one false step, one wrong answer, one betraying expression could well be his very last. While thinking on his feet, he figures out that his only hope of seeing the outside of the prison walls is to keep his act together, and helping out the prison officials deal with the situation, at the same time.

As the prison warden Jose Roca and his colleagues wait for the SWAT team to arrive, the situation gets aggravated when Malamadre reveals his trump card in the negotiations that he will undertake with the officials. He takes three terrorists—members of the ETA, a Basque separatist organisation, who are holed up in the same prison but in an isolated ward—as hostage, threatening to kill them if his demands are not met. As the goings-on get more and more politicised, a federal envoy is sent in to negotiate, the SWAT team is kept on high alert, the local radio station breaks the news, TV coverage begins, and civilians start thronging the prison gates. Among the crowd is Elena.

Meanwhile, tension mounts within the prison walls. It becomes quite apparent to Juan that ensuring that the three ETA members are not endangered is more of a priority to the envoy than saving his life. With news of similar riots breaking out in other prisons filtering in, the negotiator reveals that giving in to Malamadre’s demands might not be possible for the simple fear of inciting the riots elsewhere. And Apache (portrayed by Carlos Bardem, older brother of Javier), a fellow Colombian inmate and the prison officials’ snitch, is growing more and more suspicious of who Juan really is.

Of all film genres, prison drama is, arguably, one of the most cliché-ridden. However, writer-director Daniel Monzón (who also wrote and directed the Hitchcockian suspense thriller The Kovak Box) has succeeded in steering clear of almost all the usual triteness in this riveting film. Instead of dishing out another story involving sadistic wardens, vicious guards, and impossibly ingenious escape plans, Monzón has opted to depict a subtle indictment of the prevailing Spanish incarceration policy—in particular, the Designated for Special Surveillance (DSS) part of it that is meant for ‘murderers, jail-breakers, and psychopaths’.

In Celda 211, Monzón has shown that the Spanish prison system, like most of its brethren the world over, is hampered by hierarchy, mired in bureaucracy, and burdened with political pressure. In a vital scene in the film, he voices how he believes convicts in Spanish prisons are treated, when Juan exclaims: ‘We’re trash, and what you do with trash is take it out before it stinks’.

While touching upon the core ideas of any film that deals with prison life, such as the process of dehumanisation of the convicts, defiance of inmates against inhumane treatment, and prisoners’ constant battle with authority, Celda 211 goes one step farther. It shows that the four walls of a prison cell is a law unto its own. Sometimes, an innocent man enters the space, albeit unwillingly, and gets transformed into a transgressor.