Cube (1997 film)

''Cube'' is a 1997 Canadian independent science fiction horror film directed and co-written by Vincenzo Natali. A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project, Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson, and Maurice Dean Wint star as individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.

''Cube'' gained notoriety and a cult following, for its surreal and Kafkaesque setting in industrial, cube-shaped rooms. It received generally positive reviews and led to a series of films. An American remake, currently on hold, is in development at Lionsgate, and a Japanese remake was released in 2021.

Plot

In a pre-credits sequence, a man named Alderson wakes up in a mysterious cube-shaped room. He enters another red-colored room, but is killed in a gory manner as a thin wire mesh cuts him into cubes and he falls apart. The bloody mesh retracts to its original position.

Five different people, Quentin, Holloway, Worth, Leaven and Rennes all meet in the same room. None of them know how they got here or why they are here, and also noticing mysterious sounds outside the room they are in. Quentin, who was exploring, warns the group there are rooms with traps in them. Leaven notices metal plates with 3 sets of numbers etched into them. Rennes, an escape artist of 7 prisons, theorizes that each trap could be set by motion detectors. He tests this by throwing his boot into a room, which initially works, but after jumping into a room, acid is sprayed onto his face, killing him. The group, horrified, realizes each trap is set by different sensors.

Quentin, questioning the cube, believes each person was chosen specifically to be there. He claims he is a divorced police officer, Leaven is a young mathematics student, and Holloway is a free clinic doctor. The nihilistic Worth describes himself as a office worker with a dreary life. Leaven hypothesizes that the rooms whose plates have prime numbers on them are trapped. On their journey, they come across a mentally disabled man named Kazan. Holloway insists they bring him along, much to Quentin's dismay. Quentin injures his leg in a trapped room deemed safe by Leaven. Tension rises among the group, as well as the mystery of the maze's purpose. In a fit of rage against Quentin, Worth admits he helped construct the cube, designing the outer shell. (which is also a cube). He claims it was for a shady bureaucracy, or company of sorts. He guesses that the original purpose has just been forgotten, and they have only been placed inside just to put it to use.

Worth's knowledge of the outer shell's dimensions allows Leaven to calculate that each side of the Cube is 26 rooms across. This means the entire Cube has 17,576 rooms in total, much to the group's shock. She realizes that the numbers may indicte the Cartesian coordinates of each room. Following the theory, the group travels to the outer edge, but realize every room at the edge is trapped. Rather than backtrack, they go through a room with a sound-activated trap without making any noise. Kazan makes a noise, nearly causing Quentin's death. Quentin threatens Kazan and argues with Holloway, defending Kazan. She insinuates that Quentin may be an abusive husband who likes young girls.

The group reaches the edge, finding a bottomless abyss separating the Cube from the outer shell. Being one of the lightest, Holloway tries to swing over to the outer shell, using a rope made of the group's uniforms tied together, with everyone else lowering her down. The Cube starts shaking, causing everyone to accidentally let go of the rope, and Quentin catches it last second. He pulls her up at first, but drops her, letting her fall to her death.

Quentin, becoming more unhinged, persuades Leaven to abandon Kazan and Worth. He attempts to make a sexual advancement on her, but Worth attacks Quentin. Quentin beats Worth savagely, and drops him into the room below. Worth starts laughing hysterically, realizing they are in the same room Rennes died, indicating they have been traveling in circles. Quentin is in horror, but Worth finds the room where Rennes died in is now gone, now being at the edge of the maze. Leaven deduces that traps are not tagged by prime numbers, but by powers of prime numbers. Kazan is revealed as an autistic savant who can mentally calculate prime factorizations. With this newfound knowledge. Leaven guides the group to the edge cube, using Kazan's calculations. Worth then traps Quentin in the door, letting Leaven and Kazan escape from him. When Quentin finds them, he attempts to harm them, before Worth opens the hatch under him from the room below, falling and seemingly dying. The group travels to the bridge room where they open the exit hatch, seeing a bright light.

Worth, stricken by guilt, no longer wishes to escape. As Leaven attempts to persuade him, she is killed by Quentin, who impales her with a hatch lever. Worth attacks Quentin out of anger, which the latter mortally wounds him. Kazan flees to the other side, and Quentin pursues him, but Worth grabs his legs, pinning him in between the hatch. The cubes start moving, splitting him in half. Worth, bleeding out, crawls to Leaven's corpse to die next to her.

Kazan wanders out into the bright light, his fate left unknown.

Cast

The cast is of Canadian actors who were relatively unknown in the United States at the time of the film's release. Each character's name is connected with a real-world prison.

On casting Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, Natali's cost-centric approach sought an actor for a split-personality role of hero and villain. Wint was considered the standout among the cast and was confident that the film would be a breakthrough for the Canadian Film Centre.

Development

Pre-production

An episode of the original '' Twilight Zone'' television series, "Five Characters in Search of an Exit" (first aired 22 December 1961), was reportedly an inspiration for the film. Other inspiration was Alfred Hitchcock's ''Lifeboat'', which was shot entirely in a lifeboat with no actor standing at any point.

Director Vincenzo Natali did not have confidence in financing a film. He cost-reduced his pitch with a single set reused as many, with the actors moving around a virtual maze. As the most expensive element, a set with a cube and a half was built off the floor, to allow the surroundings to be lit from behind all walls of the cube. In 1990, Natali had had the idea to make a film "set entirely in hell", but in 1994 while working as a storyboard artist's assistant at Canada's Nelvana animation studio, he completed the first script for ''Cube''. The initial draft had a more comedic tone, surreal images, a cannibal, edible moss growing on the walls, and a monster that roamed the Cube. Roommate and childhood filmmaking partner Andre Bijelic helped Natali strip the central idea to its essence of people avoiding deadly traps in a maze. Scenes outside the cube were deleted, and the identity of the victims changed. In some drafts, they were accountants and in others criminals, with the implication that their banishment to the Cube was part of a penal sentence. One of the most important dramatic changes was the removal of food and water for a more urgent escape.

After writing ''Cube'', Natali developed the short film, ''Elevated''. It is set in an elevator to show investors how ''Cube'' would hypothetically look and feel. Cinematographer Derek Rogers developed strategies for shooting in the tightly confined elevator, which he later reused on a Toronto soundstage for ''Cube''.

Casting started with Natali's friends, and budget limitations allowed for only one day of script reading prior to shooting. As it was filmed relatively quickly with well prepared actors, there are no known outtake clips.

Filming

The film was shot in Toronto, Ontario in 21 days, with 50% of the budget as C$350,000 to C$375,000 in cash and the other 50% as donated services, for a total of C$700,000. Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, because they deferred payment on goods and services, and got the special effects at no cost.

The set's warehouse was near a train line, and its noise was incorporated into the film as that of the cubes moving. To change the look of each room, some scenes were shot with wide lens, and others are long lens and lit with different colors, for the illusion of traversing a maze. Nicole de Boer said that the white room was more comforting to actors at the start of a day's filming, compared to the red room which induced psychological effects on the cast during several hours in the confined space.

The Cube was conceived by mathematician David W. Pravica, who was the math consultant. It consists of an outer cubical shell or sarcophagus, and the inner cube rooms. Each side of the outer shell is long. The inner cube consists of 26³ = 17,576 cubical rooms (minus an unknown number of rooms to allow for movement), each having a side length of . A space of is between the inner cube and the outer shell. Each room is labelled with three identification numbers such as "517 478 565". These numbers encode the starting coordinates of the room and the X, Y, and Z coordinates are the sums of the digits of the first, second, and third number, respectively. The numbers also determine the movement of the room. The subsequent positions are obtained by cyclically subtracting the digits from one another, and the resulting numbers are then successively added to the starting numbers.

Only one cube set was actually built, with each of its sides measuring in length, with only one working door that could actually support the weight of the actors. The colour of the room was changed by sliding panels. This time-consuming procedure determined that the film was not shot in sequence, and all shots taking place in rooms of a specific color were shot separately. Six colors of rooms were intended to match the recurring theme of six throughout the film; five sets of gel panels, plus pure white. However, the budget did not stretch to the sixth gel panel, and so the film has only five room colors. Another partial cube was made for shots requiring the point of view of standing in one room and looking into another.

The small set created technical problems for hosting a 30-person crew and a 6-person cast, becoming "a weird fusion between sci-fi and the guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking".

Post-production

During post production, Natali spent months "on the aural environment", including appropriate sound effects of each room, so the Cube feels like a haunted house.

Release

''Cube'' was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival on 9 September 1997 and released in Ottawa and Montreal on 18 September. A theatrical release occurred in Spain in early 1999, while in Italy a release was scheduled for July 1999 and an opening in Germany was set for later that year. In the Japanese market, it became the top video rental at the time, and exceeded expectations, with co-writer Graeme Manson suggesting people in Japan had a better understanding of living in boxes so resonated better with the Japanese audience, as they were likely "more receptive to the whole metaphor underlying the film".

The film's television debut in the United States was on 24 July 1999 on the Sci-Fi channel.

Reception

Box office

In its home country of Canada, the film was a commercial failure, lasting only a few days in Canadian theatres. French film distributor Samuel Hadida's company Metropolitan Filmexport saw potential in the film and spent $1.2 million in a marketing campaign, posting flyers in many cities and flying members of the cast over to France to meet moviegoers. At its peak, the film was shown at 220 French box offices and became among the most popular films in France of that time, collecting over $10 million in box office receipts. It went on to be the second-highest grossing film in France that summer.

Elsewhere internationally, the film grossed $501,818 in the United States, and $8,479,845 in other territories, for a worldwide total of $8,981,663.

Critical response

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, ''Cube'' holds an approval rating of 64%, based on 39 reviews, and an average rating of 6.3/10. The website's consensus reads: "''Cube'' sometimes struggles with where to take its intriguing premise, but gripping pace and an impressive intelligence make it hard to turn away". On Metacritic, the film has a score 61 out of 100, based on 12 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".

Bob Graham of the ''San Francisco Chronicle'' was highly critical: "If writer-director Vincenzo Natali, storyboard artist for Keanu Reeves's ''Johnny Mnemonic'', were as comfortable with dialogue and dramatizing characters as he is with images, this first feature of his might have worked better". Nick Schager from ''Slant Magazine'' rated the film three out of five stars, noting that, its intriguing premise and initially chilling mood were undone by threadbare characterizations, and lack of a satisfying explanation for the cube's existence. He concluded the film "winds up going nowhere fast".

Anita Gates of ''The New York Times'' was more positive, saying the story "proves surprisingly gripping, in the best ''Twilight Zone'' tradition. The ensemble cast does an outstanding job on the cinematic equivalent of a bare stage... Everyone has his or her own theory about who is behind this peculiar imprisonment... The weakness in ''Cube'' is the dialogue, which sometimes turns remarkably trite... The strength is the film's understated but real tension. Vincenzo Natali, the film's fledgling director and co-writer, has delivered an allegory, too, about futility, about the necessity and certain betrayal of trust, about human beings who do not for a second have the luxury of doing nothing". Bloody Disgusting gave a positive review: "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back. It's simply too good a premise and too well-directed to let minor hindrances derail its creepy premise". Kim Newman from Empire Online gave the film 4/5 stars, writing: "Too many low-budget sci-fi films try for epic scope and fail; this one concentrates on making the best of what it's got and does it well".

Accolades

The film won the award for Best Canadian First Feature Film at the 1997 Toronto International Film Festival and the Jury Award at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film.

Series and remakes

After ''Cube'' achieved cult status, it was followed by a sequel, '' Cube 2: Hypercube'', released in 2002, and a prequel, ''Cube Zero'', released in 2004.

In April 2015, ''The Hollywood Reporter'' wrote that Lionsgate Films was planning to remake the film, titled ''Cubed'', with Saman Kesh directing, Roy Lee and Jon Spaihts producing and a screenplay by Philip Gawthorne, based on Kesh’s original take.

A Japanese remake, also called ''Cube'', was released in October 2021.

See also

* "The Library of Babel"
* ''Saw (2004 film)''

References

External links

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{{TIFF Best Canadian First Feature

1997 films
1997 horror films
1997 independent films
1990s science fiction horror films
Canadian horror thriller films
Canadian independent films
Canadian science fiction horror films
English-language Canadian films
Cube (film series)
Films about mathematics
Films shot in Toronto
1990s psychological horror films
Canadian Film Centre films
Trimark Pictures films
Films directed by Vincenzo Natali
Films scored by Mark Korven
Films with screenplays by Vincenzo Natali
Fictional cubes
1997 directorial debut films
Social science fiction films
1990s English-language films
1990s Canadian films
1990s Japanese films