Amazing what can be done on a low budget

Rating: 8/10 (29 September 1998)

This film begins as it goes on  gruesomely. A man wakes up in a strange room in the shape of a cube. There are doors on each of the six sides which lead to other cube-shaped chambers. He enters one of these rooms and something very nasty happens to him. Various other characters then turn up in this maze of booby-trapped cubes and the plot centres on their attempts to escape.
Cube is a long way from being a perfect film. It is plagued by the kind of melodramatic over-acting that would be more at home in the theatre and by some very portentous dialogue. And the concept of throwing a bunch of people into a confined and dangerous position and seeing how they react is hardly the most original of ideas. On the other hand I found this an impressively disturbing, intense and generally intelligent film. The low budget was probably a godsend as it restricted most of the action to one set giving the film a very claustrophobic atmosphere, and also limiting the amount of distracting special effects.
The combination of characters in Cube might seem contrived  we have a bullying cop, a compassionate doctor, a nihilistic `office worker', a geeky (but not too-geeky) maths student, an escaped escape-artist and an autistic man who, guess what, turns out to have amazing abilities that come in handy later on. While these characters are generally portrayed as stereotypes, the plot strongly suggests that there is more at work than a writer's wilful throwing together of a neat cross-section of society. Each character has skills or knowledge which could contribute towards the effort of escaping from the cube, and this sets up the central problem of the film. To escape they must work as a team, but the horror of their situation where a wrong move results in a highly unpleasant death, so alienates them from each other that they eventually become as much their own enemies as the monolithic cube in which they are trapped. Cube is clearly not a fan of the theory that people pull together in pressurised situations.
For me the fact that no final explanation was given for the existence of the cube or the presence of the people within it was a definite plus point  there are already far too many films in which (unlike reality) all the ends are neatly tied up. The possibility that it is all part of a government conspiracy is raised by one of the characters and thankfully dismissed. The idea of government conspiracies being behind everything has long ago ceased to be subversive and thought-provoking and has now entered the realm of banal cliché. The notion that someone out there knows what's going on and can be held responsible for events is, like most other vaguely comforting ideas, absent from this film. The question of what lies outside the cube remains as disturbingly unresolved as the question of what is going on inside.