25 years of ‘Cube’: Vincenzo Natali’s brutal Kafkaesque enigma
Horror tales have always dealt with high-concept ideas, where characters are thrown into a bizarre situation with no knowledge of how they got there in the first place. Rather than focusing on character or style, such movies have always thrived in the genre, from the excellence of John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 to such modern greats as James Wan’s Saw, though few have been quite as curious as Vincenzo Natali’s 1997 movie Cube.
Showing off a punk 1990s aesthetic, Natali’s film is a grubby horror that tells the story of six total strangers with varying personalities who are involuntarily placed in an endless maze with endless deadly traps. Playing out kind of like a brutal brain-teaser, the group turn into contestants in a game of cat and mouse, wherein they feel like they must move quickly, but they don’t know what from, or indeed, where they are going at all.
Gaining cult status 25 years since its release, it is the innate curiosity of Cube where the film’s concept thrives, with the answer to the impossible riddle being enticing enough to hold your attention to the very end. Though, as the cliché saying goes, ‘It’s not about the destination but the journey,’ with the stylish design of the intricate industrial titular Cube becoming as captivating as the promise of the film’s resolution.
Hiring a maths consultant for the film, mathematician David W. Pravica came on board to help with the genuinely complicated design of the 4×4 cubes that make up 100% of the film’s setting. The workings behind the $350,000 production are reasonably intricate for such a horror flick, too, with PhD level mathematics going into the making of the film as well as the script itself, with numbers and square roots explaining much of the movie’s mystery.
Inhabiting these fantastical cubes, which fatally punish those who step within the confines of the wrong space, are a host of rather conventional characters. These characters include Maurice Dean Wint’s Quentin, the muscular capitalist bully, our heroic female lead Leaven (Nicole de Boer) and Andrew Miller’s Kazan, an autistic savant who may just be the key to getting out of the brutal hell-hole.
Whilst these characters don’t exactly carry the personality to be memorable icons of horror cinema in and of themselves, they do a great job in being conduits for the inherent mystery, which contains unquestionable Kafkaesque elements. Donning identical jumpsuits and personalities that blend and meld together, sharing the same desire to escape this labyrinth and get back to the sanity of everyday life, the collective familiarity of each character plays into Kafka’s surreal vision.
Roaming a confusing land that feels impossible to untangle, the characters become victims to the seemingly nonsensical construction, aimlessly going from room to room in hopes of success and revelation. Indeed, none of the characters are aware of where they are going and why, apart from Kazan, whose idiosyncratic thinking leads him to solve (?) the vast and complex riddle.
A strange, audacious piece of horror, Cube remains a glorious enigma of ‘90s indie cinema that would act as the brutal precursor to a flurry of genre chaos in the new millennium.
