It's a bit hard to describe Cypher without spoiling the experience somewhat for the reader. It's one of those layers upon layers of intrigue type deals that you really have to have no idea about to enjoy to its full extent. So here's my (brief) description: at the start of the movie we meet Morgan Sullivan (Northam), a fairly normal (perhaps even boring) man, applying for an exciting job as a "spy" for Digicorp, a big company. He is attached to a lie detector and asked if he is a spy for Digicorp's rival.

From there we follow Sullivan's journey into the world of high-stakes espionage, where you have no idea who to trust. Directed by Vincenzo Natali, who also directed Cube, another throw-you-in-the-deep-end thriller, Cypher has many great visuals to match the enthralling storyline. The elevator scene looked great and added to the tension - my palms were sweaty. The movie I think I would compare Cypher to most closely would be Dark City, another great visual thriller. See it, I'm sure you'll enjoy it. Me, I'm off to rent Cube, Cypher and Dark City.

In 1971, Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo took 24 volunteer subjects - the most normal-seeming he could find - and randomly divided them into 12 "guards" and 12 "prisoners". Within three days the prisoners were demoralised, listless, and institutionalised (some on the verge of nervous breakdown); the guards, by contrast, had turned into sadists. Zimbardo himself was so immersed in his role of prison superintendent he found himself flying into a rage when a graduate student dared refer to his well-run prison as though it were a mere experiment. After six days the experiment was called off, but it took a horrified outsider to do so. Transplant this story to Germany and the parallels with Nazism become even more obvious; perhaps too obvious, since the men who in real life transformed themselves into fascist thugs and passive victims in just three days were randomly chosen, ordinary citizens of another country. The particular lab rat whose story we follow is Marek (played by the boyfriend from Run Lola Run), an unlikely hero - but then, technically, all the guards are just as unlikely villains. If the coin had landed heads rather than tails, Marek would have been one of them.