by Kevin Morris

Created on: February 10, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

The 1997 Canadian film Cube has garnered something of a cult following. With its small budget, limited marketing, and unique storyline, this is not a huge surprise. But the cult status of Cube and the fervor of its fans can easily mask what director Vincenzo Natali accomplished in this film. Far from being a sci-fi genre film or gimmicky concept piece, Cube is a unique and creative work of existentialist fiction, and one that deserves recognition as such.

Cube examines the plight of six strangers as they attempt to navigate an endless series of booby-trapped rooms and make sense of their predicament. Each character has awoken in an anonymous, color-coded room, with no idea of how or why they got there. Forced to work together to navigate death trap after death trap amongst a clash of personalities and value sets, they soon realize they each have a role to play. Quentin (played by Maurice Wint), is a police officer who brings discipline and hierarchy to the group, while Helen Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), a doctor, uses her compassion to ease the fears of the autistic savant Kazan (Andrew Miller). Kazan soon becomes particularly important to the group, as Levin (a teenage girl with a competent math skill played by Nicole de Boer) and Worth (a self-loathing architect who worked on the building's design played by the Tarantino near look-alike David Hewlett) use his unique brain to decipher the mysterious numerical code written on the door of each "cube".
Each character uses his or her own values to construct meaning and reason for their plight, and these ideological worldviews often collide in heated arguments and, eventually, murder. Against all this, we see that the "cube" is nothing more than an allegory for bureaucracy. Like the social machine, the cube was built without order or purpose, and has become a bureaucratic monster existing for its own sake. As these individuals attempt to navigate what Quentin calls a "public works project" run amuck, we speculate as to our own ability to navigate the indifferent and increasingly complex society in which we live.
Can the sovereign individual survive the "cube" which alienates us from one another and forces us into Kafka-esque isolation if we are unlucky enough to fall through society's cracks? Natali implies that the answer is yes, but only with great difficulty. And fortunately for the viewer, he does so with great subtlety and against a backdrop of gruesome contraptions and competent acting. Cube is an existential treat, and one I highly recommend.

Rating: 9.4/10

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