Our ongoing column giving the spotlight to movies that bucked the Hollywood Blockbuster trend and still managed to deliver a superior viewing experience. Note that these reviews may contain spoilers.
By John J. Joex
Rating: 4 out of 5 Stars
Cube is a quirky little sci fi/horror film that writer/director Vincenzo Natali (Splice) delivered to us back in 1997 as his feature-length directorial debut. It focuses on a group of people who find themselves trapped in a strange prison that consists of multiple, inter-linked cube-shaped rooms. They discover that some of the rooms have traps (like a razor-thin wire grate that will slice the unsuspecting wanderer into cubes) while others offer safe passage. None of the abductees know each other and none know how they arrived in this bizarre maze, though ultimately they determine that each serves a purpose in this maniacal exercise controlled by hidden forces. They decide that they must work together to succeed in escaping from their unjust incarceration and they start to find clues that help them determine whether a room is safe or trapped. The math genius Leaven determines that this appears to key off the serial numbers at the doors between rooms and whether one of these numbers is prime. Later, after barely escaping death in a seemingly safe room, they determine that answer lies in prime factorization of these numbers. This task at first seems impossible, but the autistic Kazan who has joined the party is a savant and has the ability to calculate the factors in his head. Leaven also determines that the numbers act as Cartesian coordinates which indicate where each room is within the overall structure and that these rooms move throughout the larger cube and eventually each will move to a location outside of it and act as a bridge to exit the prison. But because of their personality conflicts and mutual mistrust, the group begins to crumble from within before they can achieve their goal of escape.
Canadian director Natali managed to pull together this film, which he claims was inspired by the episode from the original Twilight Zone television series “Five Characters in Search of an Exit”, for about half a million dollars. And he made the most with his money by creating a creepy, claustrophobic, paranoia-drenched film following a small group of frantic people trying to understand their seemingly unmerited predicament. And he managed to maneuver past the expected pitfall of trying to make these people symbolic or representative of society in general. Instead, he created very real, believable characters, and each with apparently some function in this demented “game”. He did add one element, though, and that was a sense of guilt that each person felt for something they had done in the past (with the exception, we assume, of Kazan). This leads each of them to initially wonder, either overtly or subconsciously, if their past sins somehow lead to their imprisonment. This emphasizes that each of these people are not perfect, thus making them more human, and as we see their more sordid nature reveal itself as the film progress, the viewer almost wonders if they deserve their fate. But not to the point that we stop routing for them. We always want to see the abductees escape from this prison, even if our feelings shift from early in the film to later on which ones truly deserve to go free.
Natali sets up a Kafkaesque, Orwellian setting that immediately draws in the viewer and establishes a mood of tension and trepidation that carries the film to its bittersweet conclusion. And this is truly a Horror film, though with Science Fiction trappings, because of the threat from the traps throughout the maze as well as that unknown presence that must be controlling things from afar (the Saw film series would later follow a similar pattern, though with a much more exploitative bent emphasizing torture and gore). And the fact that Cube never answers the questions of why this prison exists or why these people were brought here (though some hints seep through) gives the film that added dimension of despondency. Had this movie come out of the Hollywood machine, it would have never been allowed to go forward with its ambiguous conclusion. But since Natali did this as an indie, he had the creative control to follow that path, making this a much stronger film. And while the film plays out as a B-Movie and the actors sometimes fall short of the emotional range required of them, it still manages to stand out as a first rate B-Movie along the lines of other successful films in this milieu such as The Invasion of the Body Snatchers and They Live.
Cube had only a limited release in the theaters Stateside, but it quickly caught on as a cult film and had a successful run when it hit the home video market. It has even spawned two follow-up films, the sequel Cube 2: Hypercube which delivered a better than expected continuation of the formula, and the prequel Cube Zero, which delves into the backstory of the Cube. But the original film is the one that captured the imaginations of Science Fiction and Horror fans alike and gave us a must-see, genre-crossing psychological thriller.
Buy Cube and Other Anti-Blockbusters on DVD from Amazon.com:
