UBE, the first feature film from 28-year-old Canadian wunderkind Vincenzo Natali, opens with a nasty prologue involving an unnamed prisoner and an ingeniously vicious trap set in a mysterious 14-foot-by-14-foot room. The film then joins Quentin (Wint), a cop; Worth (Hewlett), a nihilistic office worker; Leaven (de Boer), a student; Holloway (Guadagni), a paranoid doctor; and Rennes (Wayne Robson), an escape artist, in an identical, backlit cube-shaped room.
No one can remember how they arrived in the place. Why are they here? How do they get out? They better figure out something soon: They have only a few days before lack of food and water renders them too weak to move. The cube has six doors, one in the center of each wall, leading to other, seemingly identical rooms. The characters find themselves in a maze of adjoining cubes, no telling how huge. Should they try to move? Should they stay put? In arguing the point, the characters reveal their personalities.
Rennes prevails; he says they should try to get out. He tells them that some of the rooms hold lethal traps: torches, acid, nearly invisible wires that can slice a person into bits, activated by sound, or movement, or temperature changes. Can they avoid them? They try to test each room by throwing in a boot. It works at first. They move to another room. They try it again. This time, it doesn't work. Rennes dies a horrible death.
The group is then joined by Kazan (Andrew Miller), an autistic savant. Meanwhile, Leaven, a student of mathematics, realizes that each room has numbers that hold a key to their safety. They try it. It works. They move on. Hours pass. The longer the group is together, the more it realizes that each person is there for a reason: Leaven for her math skills; Worth because he possesses knowledge of the cube's structure; Holloway because she has medical skills. But what of Quentin? And what of Kazan?
At the same time, the group begins to break down. Friendships form, then strain. Frictions erupt between Quentin and Worth, Quentin and Holloway, Holloway and Worth. Then suspicions. But the clock is ticking, and the traps threaten. Is there a way out?
"I just want to wake up!"
Natali, the storyboard artist for Johnny Mnemonic, has said in interviews that he wanted CUBE to be a vision of hell, which he defines partly as being trapped by a malevolent, unseen force. With co-writers Graeme Manson and Andre Bijelic, he's come pretty close in this suspenseful, thought-provoking allegory.
CUBE owes debts to Sartre and Serling in its "hell is each other" theme. But Natali, Manson and Bijelic work new variations on it, undercutting viewers' expectations and moving his film into a different realm altogether. The film, consisting largely of five people arguing in a box, nevertheless holds some real scares, and that's a credit to the fine script, Natali's disconcerting direction, John Sanders' editing and the uniformly terrific acting by an ensemble cast of unknowns. (Pay attention to de Boer; she starred in the Sci-Fi Channel's Mission Genesis and also recently boarded Star Trek: Deep Space Nine as Ezri Dax, replacing Terry Farrell.)
As the characters work their way deeper into the cube maze, the audience bores deeper into each character's personality and flaws. Though they appear to be a microcosm of society, they never lose their individuality. It becomes clear that each is not quite what he or she seemed at first. And, as in life, that makes all the difference.
CUBE can be viewed as an allegory of life itself, in which the outcome is determined by what each person brings to bear. Is there a design, or is it all random? Are humans free, or simply puppets? How things work out depends on who can be trusted. But there's always the unexpected thing that blows everything to hell.
Beyond this, however, CUBE holds up as a great SF ride, particularly toward the end. One key sequence--in which the characters silently attempt to traverse a room with sound-activated knives--is especially nerve-wracking. Obviously made on a tight budget (funded by Canada's Feature Film Project), CUBE makes good use of its money in clever set design and judicious use of its convincing special effects. A word of caution to the squeamish: Take that "R" rating, for violence seriously.
