Pure supression

Rating: Null/10 (27 March 1999)

I walked into the video store and asked my friend for a freaky movie. I was still in the mood for weird freaky films (I had just re-rented Videodrome and my bizarre-quota still hadn't been met). He said they just got a new film, "Cube," and I might just be sufficiently freaked out.
With apologies to the previous reviewer, who did a great job at displaying just how much this film causes a queasy and slick feeling in your stomach, I must give this film a very high mark. It's stylizied, it's claustrophobic, and it's downright CLAMMY.
That's about the best word for it. Clammy. That kind of feeling you get when you've had a bad dream, it's 4:48am, you're awake and trying to regain your senses, and you notice you're soaked in a film of sweat.
Plot? Simple. People wake up inside a machine. What's its purpose? Why are they here? They did nothing wrong! Grrrr. Moreover, how the heck do they get out? They don't belong here. There's no plausible reason for any of them to be here.
Cop, doctor, college student, designer, idiot savant (sorry if that's not the correct definition, I saw "Rain Man" and "60 Minutes," that's my background), escape artist, and man at opening shot who is the perfect advertisement for Ronco's Slicer and Dicer.
They all have no idea why they're in this 14 feet by 14 feet by 14 feet room, with four portals in all four compass directions, and a very uncomfortable shade of light. Each room is lit in a Clive Barker-esque unstable shade of potential pain, and each room has rails on all six sides...hand holds, if you will.
Some rooms are trapped (and by trapped I mean devices that make Clive Barker's Pinhead look like Angela Lansbury in "Bedknobs and Broomsticks."), some aren't. You don't know unless you are smart enough to find a way to check. Yet, even then, the room still might be trapped. Mathematics becomes a very important part of this film, as both the college student and the savant try to figure out a method to this madness.
They're in a place more vast than their imagination can possibly fathom. Each room only leads to other rooms. Traps, pitfalls, etc., everywhere. One by one each character's mental focus breaks down as they realize they are trapped and cannot escape. They're doomed to a small room. And even the most distinguished leader of the group loses reality and becomes someone who makes Nicolson in "The Shining" look like Mr. Wizard. Nothing is as it seems...
As they work their way around the maze, inspiration followed by sadistic disappointment follow. And here's where this small-budget film that none of us would even know exists works its magic. It's one of the most blunt exposes on the human soul I've ever seen. Who leads the pack to freedom, who gives up and dies, and who is in the middle....
This is definitely a MUST-SEE film if you are even in the slightest way interested in Foucault, the prison system, and studies in human psychology. Yes, there are twists and turns left and right. Everytime they open a new hatch and slide through the walkway to the next room, there's tension beyond belief. But more importantly, if you step back and take another look at this Cube and the effects it creates on those inside, you get an abject view of confinement.
It's queasy in some parts, and after a while you get a blase sense of apathy. Near the end I almost wanted to just give up on the slowly dwindling number of characters, and just throw my hands up in frustration.
But if you look at this film as a comment on the prison system in general, you get just a glimpse into the paranoid, confined, sickening sense of claustrophobia. Every character is trapped in their own cell, left to their own devices. There might be a glittering exitway somewhere in the not to distant future, but finding the way is a trial of the Biblical Job. It's an exercise in frustration.
I'll be honest, this film really upset me. It's not the fear of death that scared me, it's the fear of living in a place you still don't know how to get out of; you're just hinting at ways of escape, and you have to rely on people you don't know to help you escape. The ending is as shocking as it is sad. This is a film that will make you think...