Welcome back to Dark Corners Streaming.
1997’s Cube, which you can find on Amazon freevee is the feature debut of director Vincenzo Natali,
and shows a director making extraordinary use of what is a single set, repeatedly redressed.
4 strangers wake up inside the mysterious cube with no memory of how they got there
and no knowledge of why they might have been put there.
‘Does anybody remember how they got here?’
There are doors in every wall and in the floor and ceiling
which lead to rooms which are identical in all but colour
and the fact that some have booby traps.
They must work together to get out, but as in most enclosed space movies,
the dangerous situation is a backdrop to the drama played out between the characters
and the danger they pose to each other.
As they go ,they debate what might be going on,
‘It’s some rich psycho’s entertainment’
and how it might work,
‘If nothing’s random, why are they here?’
bouncing from optimism,
‘I know where the exit is.’
to hopelessness.
‘There is no way out of here!’
But mostly, they rub each other up the wrong way.
‘So you go around outraged , sticking your nose up other people’s assholes, sniffing their business’
which is what happens in times of tension and this is an extraordinarily tense movie.
There are a few films like this, in fact we reviewed The Platform a few years ago,
and it is a hard thing to pull off but Cube does a couple of important things right,
‘We have to backtrack’
firstly, it keeps moving, they keep moving;
the physical movement from room to room means that the conversation doesn’t become boring
and the conversation continues to reveal character so the journey doesn’t get repetitive.
Secondly, it’s smart enough to change things up;
the premise evolves as the characters learn and the characters change too, driven by desperation.
‘17526 rooms – oh, that makes me queasy’
But actually I think the smartest thing they did was to limit the size of the group.
It would have been very easy to start with a few more people as cannon fodder
but keeping the number small actually makes it more tense;
'Get him out.'
surely they’re not all going to make it,
but you’ve got ninety minutes to get through you can’t afford to go on a spree,
so you never know when or if it’s going to happen.
‘Stop!’
Even at just ninety minutes, I did find the premise a little stretched,
and the final act maybe reveals a hint of trying too hard to keep things interesting,
‘A man and a woman, 2 halves of the equation.’
I also found some of the performances are a bit overwrought,
which is at least partly because of some quite declamatory dialogue,
‘It’s all the same machine right, Pentagon, multi national corporations, the police.’
but in a heightened situation like this, I think you let it go.
Overall I found Cube hard to like exactly, but impossible to look away.
It’s tense, compelling, it does a great job of side-stepping cinematic cliches,
and it has some intelligent things to say about how we treat each other – none of them good.
Thanks for watching. What’s your opinion of Cube and what other films do a lot with a limited set?
Let us know in the comments below.