Independent Films, Film Profiles

Cube (film)
by Vincenzo Natali

Cube is a 1997 Canadian psychological thriller/horror/science fiction movie directed by Vincenzo Natali. The film was a very successful product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project. Despite its low budget, the film achieved moderate commercial success and has acquired cult status as a niche science-fiction title. This was also the last film to be released in Canada by Cineplex Odeon Films before they changed their name to Odeon Films.Template:DCMAMuch of the film's appeal lies in its surreal, Kafkaesque settings – no extensive attempt is made to explain what the cube in which the characters are confined is, why it is created, or how the "inmates" were selected. Although the world "outside" is referred to, it is presented in an extremely abstract fashion – either a dark void or a bright white light.The film opens with a man named Alderson waking up in a strange, cube-shaped room with glowing, computer circuit-like walls and six doors, one at the center of each wall, including the ceiling and floor. After recovering from his confusion, he opens two of the doors and looks into them to find rooms that differ to the one he is in only by color. He then opens and goes through a third door. He looks around and then takes a step, but is suddenly cut into large cubes. He falls apart and the rack of crosshatched wires which diced him moves into view. It folds up and retracts.In another room, several people find each other: Quentin the cop, Worth the architect, Holloway the doctor, Rennes the ex-con escape artist, and Leaven the high school student. None of them know where they are, how they got there, or why they are there. Quentin, however, knows that there are traps, as he had looked into a room and nearly got his head cut off. The five decide to stay together and look for the way out. Rennes, who had escaped from at least seven prisons, takes the lead. He shows them how to test for traps by tossing a boot into the rooms while holding onto the laces, to trigger potential traps, figuring that the trapped room contain motion detectors. At one point he throws the boot in and comes up with nothing, but figures out from smell that there are sensors rigged to detect the chemicals that come off of skin. Soon after, Rennes jumps into a room tested with a boot, and is sprayed in the face with acid. The others pull him back, but he dies as the acid corrodes his face and the inside of his head. The group deduces that the floor must have pressure or thermal sensors, and decide that they need a better way to test for traps.Quentin asks everyone about their occupations. He is a cop, Holloway is a free clinic doctor, and Worth works "in an office building, doing office building stuff." Leaven claims to do nothing but "hang out" with her friends. Quentin believes that nothing is a coincidence, that each of them has a purpose in the cube. He asks why Leaven has her glasses, while Holloway has had her jewellery taken away. Leaven reveals herself to excel at mathematics, and recalls that each room had a set of numbers engraved in the crawlspace between the doors. She theorizes that when one of those numbers is prime, the room is trapped.Leaven's purpose becomes attempting to "crack the Cube's code", and they progress through the cubes. When they find themselves in a room with trapped rooms all around and below, Quentin checks the door in the ceiling, through which falls a seventh person: Kazan. He appears to be mentally handicapped. At least two of the others see him as a burden, but Holloway decides to bring him along.The group starts speculating about their surroundings, which leads to a conflict between Quentin and Holloway. Quentin dismisses Holloway's ideas as conspiracy theories, and Holloway thinks that Quentin is naive.Quentin enters a room without prime numbers and narrowly avoids death. Leaven's theory that non-prime-numbered rooms are safe is shown to be incorrect, and the group rests. Worth and Quentin get into a fight, and it is revealed that Worth is one of the architects who designed the enormous cube-shaped shell which contains the cube-shaped rooms. Although the others begin to distrust Worth, he is able to give them information about the dimensions of the outer cube: it is 434 feet on each side. Leaven then intuits that the numbers between the rooms could be encoded cartesian coordinates representing the position of rooms within the Cube.The group finally reaches the "edge" of the Cube, but discovers that there is a gap between the door and the outer shell. They fashion a rope from their clothes, and Holloway volunteers to swing out on the rope to investigate. As she is suspended outside the room, the Cube shakes and Holloway nearly falls. Quentin catches her, but then lets her fall to her death. He tells the others that she slipped.They then decide to try to reach the "bottom" edge of the Cube, but agree that they need to rest before setting out for it. As they sleep, Quentin carries Leaven into another room. He tries to convince Leaven to abandon the others, he also makes sexual advances at her. Worth and Kazan wake up to save Leaven. Quentin says that he did not trust Holloway, and the group guesses that Holloway's death was not an accident. Enraged, Quentin throws Worth through a door in the floor. Worth begins to laugh hysterically at what he sees in that room: Rennes's corpse. They think that they have been going in circles, but then Worth notices that the "acid room" which killed Rennes is no longer adjacent to that room. He and Leaven realize that the rooms must be changing locations.Leaven also realizes that rooms which have traps are marked with numbers which are not simply prime numbers, as she had previously thought, but the larger set of prime powers. The prisoners then face the task of performing prime factorizations of three three-digit numbers for every room they enter. Fortunately, Kazan is at this point revealed to be an autistic savant with the capacity to perform these factorizations quickly and easily. He utters the number of distinct prime factors each number has, as the room numbers are read to him.They make their way towards the exit safely with Kazan's help. Worth devises a plan to incapacitate Quentin, who has gone completely mad. Worth fights Quentin into a room below them and leave him to die. They proceed and reach the bridge cube. When they open its door, bright light pours into the room. Worth announces that he will not go, as there is nothing for him in the world outside. As he and Leaven share a moment, Quentin appears having somehow managed to catch up with the trio, and kills Leaven by stabbing her with a door handle he somehow broke off a door. He stabs Worth as well, and grabs Kazan, who is climbing out. Worth grabs Quentin's leg with the last of his strength, and Quentin is crushed in the crawlspace between the cubes when the cubes realign. Having saved Kazan, Worth lies down next to Leaven and dies.In the final shot, Kazan is seen walking slowly into a bright light.