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Pop quiz, hotshot: you wake up in a cube-shaped room that looks like one of Clive Barker’s daydreams with entry points into other similar rooms, many of which are booby-trapped. One of the potential rooms has the numbers 517 478 565 labeled at its entrance. Is the room safe to enter or not?
That’s why you’re dead.
Vincenzo Natali wanted to make an inexpensive movie and set about it by pitching a story in which a single location could substitute for many. Using colored sliding panels to change its palette from scene to scene, one 15-foot room could represent over 500 cubed spaces — a hellish maze for its inhabitants to escape from. The result is Natali’s “Cube,” a 1997 sci-fi horror film that also counts as psychological. That is, the horror comes from something more abstract than a tentacled monster or masked slasher.
A varied group of strangers find themselves trapped in a series of cube-shaped rooms, whose configuration constantly shifts. Figuring out the mechanics and predictability of those shifts takes up a fair amount of the film’s runtime, even among a group that includes a mathematics student and an ex-con skilled in prison escapes. There is no food or water available, either, placing a sense of urgency onto the ordeal.
They can’t just go into rooms nimbly-bimbly; the film’s opening scene has some poor soul (Julian Richings) dropping into the wrong cube and getting diced into stew chunks by a razor-sharp grate. Other rooms have flamethrowers and lasers, but there’s a pattern to the traps. To get past them, one needs to have the expertise of several skilled professionals, including Cartesian coordinates and prime number factorization. Like any good escape room scenario, it’s teams that will survive, not individuals.
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