Review: Cube

Six strangers (Maurice Dean Wint, David Hewlett, Nicky Guadagni, Andrew Miller, Nicole de Boer, and Wayne Robson) wake up inside separate square rooms, having no idea where they are or how they got there. These rooms all combine to make up the giant geometrical structure of the title. Each room has a door leading to another room, some of these rooms have potentially deadly booby-traps in them. These six people will need to band together to figure out how to get out of the cube. With some of the temperamental personalities in the mix here, however, that’s easier said than done.

 

It has some seriously dodgy acting and really starts to go astray after about 50 minutes, but this 1997 gimmicky thriller from debutant director/co-writer Vincenzo Natali (who went on to make “Cypher” and “Splice”) has quite a bit to like.

 

There’s some interesting ideas going on here, the mystery is kinda interesting, and from a production design point-of-view it’s striking. But once one particular character has lost their cotton pickin’ mind, it goes downhill, and there’s no getting around the fact that aside from the quite solid David Hewlett (the only actor you might recognise, playing the only interesting character), the cast is pretty rank. Chief offender is the especially terrible Nicky Guadagni, who acts like she’s never even heard of the acting profession before, let alone studied the craft. She’s that bad, not to mention her character behaves inconsistently, and I doubt it’s just the script that’s the problem. Next worst is the almost literally eye-popping and mouth-foaming Maurice Dean Wint, in an especially poorly modulated performance where you can’t tell when he actually went bonkers because it seems like that’s how he started. I understand that the film was shot in something like 20 days, but the performances are way too bad to really excuse.

 

The film starts off in the best possible way, with an awesome slice-and-dice. It had me wondering if these characters had somehow found themselves stuck inside the Lament Configuration puzzle box from “Hellraiser”. The set design is immediately striking and effective. It’d probably look even better if the film were in B&W, if you ask me. The angles get varied up so that you get bored, either (Amazingly, only one or two rooms were actually built, Natali varying colours up to fool you into thinking it’s more expansive- and expensive- than it really is. Bravo!). The premise is irresistible, and might remind you quite a bit of “Saw” (which came out much later of course), except with violence that is ‘fun’ instead of that yucky ‘torture porn’ stuff. I find the basic situation here much more frightening than the “Saw” films, probably because it taps into my own fears: I’m absolutely crap at mathematics, and would be completely fucked in this situation. Prime numbers? Fogedaboutit.

 

With better performances and a less histrionic final third, this could’ve been a minor gem. As is, it’s just a shade below a recommendation. The screenplay is by Natali, Andre Bijelic, and Graeme Manson.

 

Rating: C+