The only way outta here is going piece by piece

Rating: Null/10 (21 July 2001)

"Cube" is a dark and disturbing film that is sure to inspire feelings of paranoia, estrangement and mistrust in any viewer. The stark setting, the inescapable frustration of a thoroughly unexplained situation and the very human actions of the characters makes this a singularly powerful piece of psychological cinema. A cop, a doctor, an architect, a prisoner, a brilliant math student and an intellectually disabled man wake to find themselves imprisoned in a cube-shaped room with a single door in each wall. All complete strangers, none of them know why they are there, how they got there, what purpose the structure has nor who built it. To work their way through the puzzle, they have to survive the fiendish traps hidden randomly throughout, like the acid jets which burn off one guy's face and the invisible razor mesh which reduces another inmate to a pile of square-shaped chunks in the opening sequence. Once they slowly discover what's going on, even if they don't know why, avoiding the traps turns out to be the easy part as their own psychological breakdowns caused by their unique and inexplicable circumstances prove to be the deadliest obstacle of all. This is a tense, claustrophobic and sadistic science fiction thriller in which the main enigmas of who and why are never revealed, given even more impact in light of the subsequent rise in popularity of voyeuristic TV shows like 'Survivor'. "Cube" takes the phrase 'thinking outside the square' to a whole new level.