Spoilers below for Cypher. There are a myriad of celebrity documentaries these days. Cypher is not one of them. It sure seems like one, though: Centering on the rapper Tierra Whack, the film follows her rise from a viral sensation freestyling on a Philadelphia street corner to a visionary artist who has collaborated with Beyoncé. It has the trappings of a typical music doc—behind-the-scenes footage of her shows, drives around her hometown, confessionals from her and her team—until the conspiracy theorists come in.
What begins as an unfiltered look at the rapper’s life frantically spirals into the world of secret societies and cults. First, a fan approaches her after a show with a warning; Whack and her team brush her off. But after the encounter, they receive eerie emails from the fan, including videos about a secret society called the Oculists and their alleged plans to perform an initiation ritual on Whack. She soon realizes she’s being followed, watched, even unknowingly recorded as she travels around the world. As she and her team try to ignore the fan’s fixation, more and more unsettling events occur.
But was it even real? “No, it wasn’t,” Whack tells ELLE.com. “Thank God, right?” She laughs on the other end of a Zoom call when I tell her she successfully bamboozled me. Later that night at Cypher’s Brooklyn premiere, she would fool a theater full of viewers who progressively squirmed and shouted at the screen as if they were watching a horror movie. But that’s exactly what she and director Chris Moukarbel, aimed to do.
“I want people to go in almost blind and then it just hits you on the back of the head,” Whack says. Moukarbel wanted to take audiences “on this journey that they don’t expect,” he tells ELLE.com. “That just made it a lot more fun for me. Tierra is one of these rare artists that would actually be down to do something like this, and I figured that out right away.”
The perfect partner for an out-of-the-box “documentary” is Tierra Whack, who’s known to bend the rules of music, art, and fashion. Her 2018 debut album Whack World was revolutionary, consisting of 15 one-minute songs without sacrificing craftsmanship. In 2021, she released a trilogy of EPs titled Pop?, Rap?, and RB? that experimented and played with each genre. When it comes to brand collaborations, hers range from Vans to Lego.
Cypher premiered at Tribeca Film Festival this summer, where it earned the Founders Award for Best U.S. Narrative Feature. Now it’s out on Hulu and in select theaters via Andscape, the platform formerly known as The Undefeated. Moukarbel says he literally came up with the idea in a dream. And as a director who has worked on documentaries before, like Banksy Does New York and Gaga: Five Foot Two, he wanted to pivot and “blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction.” He met Whack in 2019 and floated the idea.
“As somebody who’s online a lot, like a lot of us, I was just coming across these recurring stories and conspiracy theories that I think we’ve all seen,” Moukarbel says of the influences behind Cypher. There may be parallels with the idea of the Illuminati, but he began writing the story before QAnon theories started running rampant at the height of COVID-19. That just proved that this film would resonate with the public.
The initiation ceremony detailed in Cypher comes from a real manuscript from the 18th century from an actual society called the Oculists, which was deciphered in 2012. Most of the film was scripted, but it was also reactive to real moments in Whack’s life.
Cypher can be seen as a response to the influx of documentaries right now, too. “We’re living in peak music doc moment, and so the market is so saturated,” says Moukarbel. “I think audiences are a little more cynical now because they’ve seen so many come through and they’re asking, ‘Does this artist really need a documentary?’ And so the way I approached this with Tierra was that for someone like Tierra to do a music doc, it would have to be bizarre and it would have to be, again, genre-defying in this way.”
Whack’s foray into film likely won’t end here. She wants to do comedy films, but also play a zombie. Her interests are “like night and day, 50/50, split down the middle,” she says. It’s much like her approach as an artist. She excels at blending humor with dark and avant-garde aesthetics, the playful with the perplexing, which makes her work all the more compelling. She isn’t leaving music behind, either. Whack has an album due out next year and just dropped a single, “Chanel Pit,” earlier this month.
In the end, she was happy with the outcome. “But it worked, and we watched the last take and we were like, ‘Yes!’ Everybody clapped and we were so happy.” As for the rest of her album, Whack teases, “I’m giving you guys everything, so I think there will be something for every person in the world.” In the meantime, she’s ready to blow your mind with Cypher.
