Rewind: Cube (1997)

Director: Vincenzo Natali

Starring: Nicole de Boer, Maurice Dean Wint, David Hewlett

It’s Saw II, but smart.

I first heard of Cube back in high school when I was being tutored for the math portion of the ACTs. The tutor, who would be right at home at the AV club in Stranger Things, was easily and thankfully sidetracked; I did just fine on the test itself, but learned something much more important from the guy during the time–math was actually really cool. You just had to really understand the boring parts of it to appreciate the sum total of all the information numbers could and did play with. I can’t exactly remember how Cube came up, but I like to think it was him attempting to justify–in laymen’s’ terms–how math might just one day save your life.

Cube opens with a grizzly, disorienting intro that shows the viewer that there is a series of box-shaped rooms, people are trapped in them, and some rooms have murderous booby-traps that would likely make the visitors to the fictitious website “Jigsaw Rules” salivate. It then plunges directly into the plot itself, centering around a band of six–test subjects? Victims? The movie is coy–who all congregate in a central, white box. Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), who would doubtlessly be played by Will Smith in a big budget reboot, is a single father cop, and a natural leader. Almost instantly, he begins calling the shots, his personality much bigger and more overpowering than the bookish Leaven (Nicole de Boer), the nihilistic office worker Worth (David Hewlett), the paranoid altruist Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), or the mentally handicapped Kazan (Andrew Miller).

For the sake of efficiency, I’ve summed these characters up by their notes, but the movie reveals these notes organically for the most part, save for the sixth and oldest test subject, an escape artist named Rennes (Wayne Robson). Quentin, the cop, takes a good long look at him, chuckles knowingly, and says to the group, “This, right here, is The Rennes.” Rennes is a nice propulsive device in the early stages of the film’s exposition. He’s the first to suggest that the series of rooms is a puzzle, and that the traps can be predicted. He uses his boots to set off motion sensors, letting them fall victim to the traps instead of him. Like many contestants in Murder Game movies, he’s one step ahead of the game until he isn’t. Between Jigsaw and now Cube, I have been treated to not one but two scenes of someone’s face melting in acid within a 24 hour period. When it rains, it pours.

Rennes’ passing, though, is when the movie gets really interesting.

See, something the crew all noticed but ignored prior to losing Rennes was that within each crawlspace linking the rooms was a set of three, three-digit numbers. This is when Leaven’s math skills come into play–she realizes that all safe rooms have prime numbers in their “serial number.” This quickly sets her apart her as the most valuable asset in the group. Meanwhile the survivalist Quentin identifies Kazan, who must be guided along, as the Least Valuable asset. This especially comes to a head during a close call in a room in which the booby-trap is activated by sound, and one of Kazan’s tics is a perennial hoot. The compassionate, if not cuckoo Holloway quickly steps in to Kazan’s defense, unwittingly identifying herself–in Quentin’s eyes–as the biggest obstacle to survival.

Soon, the numeric codes prove more complex than a mere prime number puzzle, and what’s more, the team might just be going in circles. This is when Cube’s central drama unfolds. In a post-election year when an authoritarian leader has people more divided by tribe, on edge, and paranoid than ever, the Cube as a metaphor for existence feels all the more relevant. Quentin, whose confidence and leadership is calming in the movie’s early stages, soon deteriorates into a fascist taskmaster–it’s clear his lack of mathematical understanding is actually holding the group back, and he may even be responsible for some of the seemingly collateral deaths that have occurred along the way. Worth, meanwhile, quiet for the most part during the movie’s exposition, is revealed to have worked on the Cube’s exterior, and his nihilistic worldview and his situational perspective perfectly collide when he says, in desperation: “There’s no way out.”

The movie, however, is not content to let the character’s remain in their original notes, and instead watches Quentin stumble further upon his descent into darkness, and lets both the blindly optimistic Holloway and the emptily pessimistic Worth have a meeting of the minds that feels both genuine and earned. Holloway leaves with the understanding that the world is a far more simple, indifferent place than her “heroes and villains” paranoia would have her believe, and Worth’s actions demonstrate a newfound desire to facilitate the escape of others, even if he himself does not intend to escape at all.

Eventually, Leaven and Worth note that there is, indeed, a greater method to the Cube’s madness, and plot an escape, and what becomes of them, Holloway, Quentin, and Kazan, I will leave to the viewer to discover. I found it more than worth a watch; it holds up incredibly well and is available to stream on Netflix. Cube is from that era of 90’s indie thrillers–in the tradition of Pi, where sometimes I was concerned it was making itself deliberately hard on the eyes, whether through fast edits or shaky, closeup camera angles, but I quickly relaxed into the environment the movie was trying to create, which was very consistent and well-planned. It’s essentially one of those movies that takes place entirely in one room–to give the illusion of traveling to other rooms, the director changed the colors on the tiles of the cubes’ walls. But there’s nothing static about the movie at all–you’re always in motion, always anxious to see what lies behind the next door, even though you’re technically looking at it already.

B+