Enjoyment squared

Rating: 6/10 (12 May 2013)

It was writer-director Vincenzo Natali's entertaining and bizarre Splice that drew my attention to his earlier work, and this is his debut feature: a low-budget Canadian sci-fi set entirely in an enormous cube, containing a series of smaller, room-sized cubes. A group of strangers awaken with no memory of how they became trapped. They need to find a way out - except some rooms are booby-trapped. Tension, conflict and madness ensues.
Some have remarked upon the acting quality in the film, although I rather enjoyed the larger-than-life reactions of the characters. The film unashamedly embraces its own B-movie silliness. As the post-Saw horror genre has seemingly become a contest of escalating cruelty and gross-out money shots, a film whose thrills rely on inventive camera angles, imaginative narrative twists, and scarily unpredictable character mood swings seems almost quaint. But it works, thanks to its devotion to the puzzle at its heart and the descending psychology of those trying to solve it.
The production design is simple (Natali's team built one cube and changed the wall colour to represent different rooms) and the make-up is effectively gruesome. It's the kind of movie where you'll be constantly questioning character motivations, but surrender to the ride and you'll find yourself enjoying a very neat cult gem.