Cube (Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

[colinr0380]

Re-watching Cube in over a decade (maybe the first time in over two decades looking at the cobwebs on my VHS tape of the film! That made me feel old!) and it still holds up. The claustrophobic atmosphere is handled really adeptly (it is still amazing to know that they had just the one set and just changed the lighting colours of it to signify different rooms) and like that earlier short film Elevated it handles its inter-personal conflicts between the characters extremely well with nuance and subtle turns in the drama. While there is tension and misunderstanding (and outright anger and hostility) there this is not just a film that devolves into characters screaming incoherently at each other to heighten drama but always has a reason for them to be interacting with each other the way that they do. That might be something so obvious it is taken as a given, but few recent films (I'm looking at you, first Unfriended film!) seem to realise that you want to develop even unsympathetic characters so that they seem like plausible human beings under tension rather than just raving lunatics. And that makes the turn one character does at the end of Cube into a complete mental breakdown more powerful, as the other characters can recognise it along with the audience.

Beyond that, I loved being reminded of the 'crossing the trapped room in silence' section, which in having to get across a bunch of people from one side to the other has always struck me as being a kind of version of those Irwin Allen disaster thrillers where Shelley Winters has to lead people through a flooded kitchen, or Paul Newman has to guide other characters down a collapsed staircase in The Towering Inferno, etc. They are mini-set piece dramas within the wider drama (much as the cube is a box within a wider mystery) where the tension comes from the painstaking preciseness of getting through the dangerous environment, repeated for everybody in the party, and hoping that your favourite characters make it through.

That is quite different from anything about to follow Cube, but it is also amazing to think how much other films payed homage to Cube's traps in the following decade. From many moments in the Resident Evil films (most obviously including the repeat of the person getting cubed moment in the laser room in the first film) to the turn that horror was to make into the 'torture porn' genre of Saw, with people stuck fighting for survival for inexplicable reasons against traps that may or may not be designed with escape in mind, the legacy of Cube is everywhere in 2000s horror. But nobody ever did it quite as good as Natali and his cast and crew here.

[colinr0380]

I asked Chris if he could set up a dedicated thread for Cube and move over my previous post from the "Upcoming Films on UK TV" thread because I caught the film on late night television again over the weekend and ended up with some more thoughts that build on the comment from last year, which may have been worth giving the film its dedicated thread. At the very least following the train of thoughts got me excited and raring to write them down as soon as possible in case I forgot them, which I find is usually a good sign that the post could be worthwhile!

Anyway, this is probably not going to get into any new territory for those who have seen the film but while there will be major spoilers following, I wanted to delve more into the ‘interpersonal group dynamics’ aspect of the film rather than its enigmatic grander mystery sci-fi plot. Although it could probably be argued that the plot of what/where/how the Cube came to be is just one big McGuffin for the interpersonal group dynamics! But before getting into Cube specifically, I wanted to look forward to the later Saw series, and one of its entries in particular that I think really bears comparison to Cube and helped me a lot to clarify my thinking about Natali’s film.

Saw V is deep into the convoluted lore of that series. The mysterious mastermind Jigsaw is long dead and yet another of his imperfect acolytes (a cop) is imperfectly continuing the legacy of devious traps to teach bunches of despicable people moral lessons through pain and torture. Eventually in one of the more ironic twists to the series the cop himself will succumb to the temptation of building impossible death traps with no possible escape to them as a way of settling scores rather than occupying the lofty (albeit brutally wounding) moral high ground regarding those being tortured of the original figure. As an audience watching the fifth film in this series, we are well prepared for ironic inescapable deaths of those rotating expendable casts of characters in the ‘B plot’ of the film who are mostly there to show how the horrible torture devices work in graphic detail. Which means that Saw V comes as quite a big shock, because it plays the whole situation ‘straight’ for once.

The five people in the ‘B plot’ of the film start out having no idea of the connection between them. One of them gets ‘accidentally’ killed (or sacrificed by the others?) in the first trap through maybe just not knowing what to do in time. As the group collectively progress through the aggressively linear series of rooms (in comparison to the ‘victims’ in the other films in the series more usually being seen through the eyes of another figure existing ‘outside’ of the situation and being left to fail to save them) they keep being given the choice of acting together to work through the situation where they will all suffer a little bit, but all survive, or to choose someone to sacrifice to spare the rest from any suffering at all.

Inevitably the group choose the latter option in almost all cases, with one person from the group ending up gorily killed in each of the rooms! Though as the group progresses and becomes both more proficient with navigating the space but familiar with each other as well the dynamics shift too. The deaths of those failing each of the traps in the rooms goes from accidental (as in the first victim); to getting rid of any obvious bad guy who is wanting just to save himself to progress to the next room by killing someone – anyone – else (which is the ‘Hollywood’-style morality of the hero justifiably killing the obvious evil doer, with no need to feel guilty about doing so, since they were forced into that situation of having to choose anyway by both the circumstances and the person’s behaviour combining to make them the obvious choice to die); to the last two people actively colluding to kill the third person in the next room, before then progressing to the final room where they presumably will have to gladiatorial battle to the death against each other for one to come out victorious….

But there is an extremely ironic twist awaiting which makes Saw V one of the more classically allusive entries in the series as being more obviously a straight morality play rather than being that but with an added twist that those meting out the punishment are altogether corrupt as well (although at this point Hoffmann is perhaps keeping to the original ethos better than many acolytes did!). Instead of a battle arena which the two remaining victims are gearing up for, they reach a room with five Perspex boxes over separate table saws and are told by the puppet in the video (which has been assuming in its pre-recorded segments that they have been working together in the previous rooms) that all they need to do is make a blood sacrifice to fill up the container underneath the saws with enough blood to trigger the locked door to open before they are blown up by the bombs planted in the room. It involves a small cut into the webbing between the first and second fingers. It will be a painful and a permanently scarring reminder of their torture (and culpability for the moral failings they were all collectively responsible for in their past which turns out to have been a house fire that they were all involved with covering up), but because there are five of them all collectively responsible and all collectively contributing their blood to pay back the debt of their wrongdoings, they will survive it mostly unscathed.

Except of course, there are not five victims left at this point, only two. The other three were sacrificed either through accident at the start, bickering turning into violence in the middle, and actively premeditated murder by the end to reach this point. So the two remaining characters instead of making a little nick into their hands to leave them with a matching permanent scar of their experience, instead end up having to cut straight up the whole of their arms in order to provide the equivalent of the blood of five from just two people in the time allotted.

That’s one of the very best ‘B plot’ arcs of the whole of the Saw series because it actually has a well thought through moral lesson to impart which the characters never learn but the audience goes away pondering (or at least should go away pondering!), whilst also staying true to the essential darkly cynical philosophy of the Saw series that people never learn their lessons until it is too late, or fail to act in a way that hurts others as a consequence and were often already done for as decent human beings long before they ended up in a grimy industrial warehouse somewhere chatting to a puppet.
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So, to go back to Cube, which I argued a little in that previous post from last year feels like one of the ur-texts from which the Saw series, and torture porn subgenre in general, sprung from. Watching it again over the weekend I focused much more on the group dynamics and felt a real similarity to the ironic ‘failed team building’ exercise that would later be taken to the bloody extremes of Saw V.

It had not really hit me so strongly before that as well as everyone being given specific qualities that are necessary for all to get through the situation, that we are also seeing that process being immediately complicated through the death of Rennes, who the cop Quentin is able to recognise for being an infamous prisoner who has been able to escape from many maximum security prisons in his time. Maybe Rennes had been placed in the Cube to act as the safeguarding guide for the rest of the group whilst they figured everything else out, but unfortunately he is only about looking out for himself (and the boots of others!) to recognise that he has a role in the group, and ironically gets unfortunately validated in his fundamental distrust of others when having to stop and give them a lecture due to being annoyed by their bickering means that he neglects to check if the next room is safe before he sets foot in it!

That then in a blackly comic way leaves the group without the guide through the traps and places an extra burden onto them that was probably not intended by whoever had dumped them all together collectively into that place! And probably the lack of Rennes to take on that role is what drives Quentin into feeling the need to have to take over which results in his over authoritarian, abusive behaviour and eventual complete mental breakdown. In the ‘ideal’ situation likely Quentin’s role would have been to have ‘policed’ Rennes to keep him in check and from escaping the group whilst getting them though the trap rooms safely. With the removal of the prisoner to ‘safely’ police instead Quentin’s controlling behaviours go from being focused onto a single, arguably deserving of the gaze, person into wildly spreading out into personally threatening all the other members of the group in turn.

That itself makes me see the characters as being naturally broken up into mutually dependent pairs within the collective group of six: Rennes and Quentin are criminal and cop; Holloway is the doctor in danger of spinning out into wild conspiracy theorising that may just be the result of a brilliant mind eating itself up from the inside over the need to do something, anything, about the situation until Kazan is introduced and she is able to shift her focus from that onto someone more specifically in need by understanding his condition, empathising with him and calming him down; and Leaven and Worth seemingly do not fit together as a good pairing at all until we get to the magnificent final scene:

“What is out there?”
“Boundless human stupidity"
“I can live with that”

, where Worth’s overwhelming to the point of inaction cynicism about the nature of humanity is contrasted against Leaven’s more youthful (dangerously naïve?) wish to keep going on anyway and not just lying down and accepting defeat. And the sudden loss of Leaven at the end is what gives Worth the last burst of righteous anger to defeat Quentin at the last possible moment (although you could also just as much argue that Worth giving into his cynicism about humanity at the last moment is what actually dooms them both by letting Quentin catch up to them all).

Every character is getting their equal and opposite figure to both contrast against them but also to in some ways balance them out too. Left unchecked they are all at risk of spiralling into destruction of themselves and others. While it does not mitigate his actions later in the film, that feels to be Quentin’s unacknowledged tragedy from the beginning of the film: that he has lost the yin to his yang that would have centred him as a character and is struggling to define himself and his role within the group after that loss, as if he is trying to contain both the ‘I’m out for myself’ criminal and ‘I’m doing it for your benefit’ cop aspects at the same time within a single person, which makes the whole façade of personality begin to crumble. Quentin isn’t ‘revealed’ as the monster he always was, he’s a human being destroyed under the weight of expectations, both self-imposed and from others, and in his frustration gets reduced to his basest element under that pressure. In a lot of these labyrinth tales (say, House of Leaves) there is no true minotaur at the heart of the labyrinth, which usually results in one of the human beings having to step in to take on that sacrificial monstrous role instead, as with Quentin here.

And maybe that is also why he lashes out at the others, because he can subconsciously feel them bonding better with each other whilst he has no one, which amplifies his behaviour in response, which makes them actively hostile to him in turn, and so on until the escalation into actual violence seems like an inevitable build rather than a shocking turn of events. The big ‘what if?’ of this story is what if Rennes had not died? Would everything have gone differently then?

Beyond Quentin, there is also the bookending irony at the other end of the film where just as Rennes is immediately taken out before he has a chance to even realise his role in the situation all of the other characters get pared away as they ‘fulfil their function’ in the story until only the mentally disabled Kazan remains to walk off into the white light and into the world – the one character unable to articulate what happened to him and to understand the world he is going back to in order to take us, the audience, with him. So we are left behind inside the cube as much as the other five are.

I could imagine there being an alternate universe film there where everyone just stayed still and talked it over as a calm group, worked out what the numbers meant and that the room they woke up in and around was the one safe room they needed to remain in until it moved back to its ‘bridging’ position. But in a situation where calm level headedness and leaps of intuition were necessary to achieve that goal of maximum success, the more likely result is that people end up sniping at each other and retreating into their own specific views of the world as both a way to comfort themselves that there was no other possible option and to define themselves against others. Where everyone has a piece of the puzzle, but no one person has the full picture.

And that is why Cube is also a case study in how the over idealist nature of Communism, which does not factor in human nature into its calculations, or if it does simplifies it into insulting abstractions, does not really work in the real world without causing a lot of collateral damage!
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So anyway yet another viewing of Cube keeps showing that it is an entertaining and rich film that grows so much deeper on multiple viewings. It is one of those films that has been sitting at the back of my mind for decades now to occasionally idly pull out and twist and turn around like a puzzle box to see how it has changed in the mind’s eye, and I always find something worthwhile comes from doing that.

[Murdoch]

I posted my thoughts on the film back during one of the Horror Lists Project. It's a fun little genre picture, and I remember actually liking the sequels as well.

I just finished watching this thanks to it being brought to my attention by your post - for some reason I always confused it with The Cell - and was surprised at its twist in the group dynamics common in these types of strangers forced into a horrific situation movies.

SpoilerShow

The most interesting aspect of the group is how the family man and impromptu leader, Quentin, slowly descends into psychopathy, carelessly throwing his counterpart, Worth, into rooms to see if his projectile is mutilated or not. Quentin, unlike countless others in films with similar premises, doesn't keep the idea of seeing his kids again as his "reason," as he puts it, but instead devolves into the base desire to survive above all else. It can be argued that the desire to see his children was his driving force throughout the film, but I thought that something he eventually abandoned and used to mask his selfish notions of survival as the preservation of himself and at the expense of others.

The only other character given a fleshed-out identity is Holloway - the best we come to know of Worth is he designed the outer shell of the cube and has lost the will to live, Leaven is simply the genius math student, and Kazan is mentally handicapped yet also gifted with numbers. There's an interesting play of gender dynamics between Quentin and Holloway, as she questions his family man persona, to which he responds with male chauvinist rhetoric by accusing her choice of profession - doctor - and caring for the mentally retarded Kazan as a manifestation of her infertility. Quentin's evil brutishness doesn't rear its head until after Holloway's accusations that he abused his children, turning him into some sort of Stepfather-esque madman.

What strikes me the most about Quentin is how far the writers push him toward the animalistic desire to survive, coming to its apex when he forces himself upon Leaven in an attempt to get to the "bottom." At first I thought the film would descend into an Exterminating Angel-esque microcosm of society, with Leaner forced to protect herself against her male companions after Holloway is killed, but the film takes the more conventional route of having one individual take upon the role of villain while the others protect themselves against his attacks.

The ending I didn't particularly care for, however, as Quentin inexplicably appears to offer a final battle, despite his obvious incomprehension of the mathematical prime number system that governed the cube. Leaven being quickly killed off made me hate the writers as the ending was just a rushed attempt to create tension despite going against the internal logic the movie had previously established. That Leaven, who was the reason any of them found the exit, is killed in a matter of seconds by the guy that nearly raped her, and then basically forgot about as the final battle ensues, gave me a sickening feeling that discouraged me from fully enjoying the movie.

All in all this is an interesting precursor to the torture porn subgenre that mfunk has discussed, and while I never particularly cared for those kinds of films, the group dynamics and a captivating premise offered enough to keep me interested.

[colinr0380]

That’s a really interesting post although I wonder if it also plays into my semi-jokey ‘metaphor for Communism’ idea above. Quentin and Holloway have the strongest ‘socially important’ roles but as soon as they are removed from that immediate status they start to reveal their own insecurities (or even worse revert to family-style ‘mom and dad are fighting again’ arguing roles!) and more disturbing behaviours that were under the surface that were only being barely repressed by them having an important social function in the world but were obviously there all along underneath the surface before finding the opportunity to be expressed (the conspiracy theorising of Holloway against the rather too sexual Quentin, as shown initially 'societally acceptably' by the mention of just how many kids he has before the focus turns more and more towards Leaven). Holloway finds her function again in Kazan to stop her from fully plunging into despairing Activist-style conspiracy theorising, but of course Quentin only briefly finds his counterpart and is left to spiral into madness.

And Leaven is the idealist still-student (more adept and comfortable with in dealing with concepts in the abstract rather than the messy interpersonal situations going on in front of her) set against the nihilistically cynical Worth who has been compromising himself through his work for pay to the point that he is utterly disillusioned to the point of apathy. Worth, of course, is the most relatable character in the film! Leaven may not have the same elevated role in the society as Quentin and Holloway do as yet, but she is on the path to that once she leaves education and enters the world. So (only emphasising how mathematically-minded this film is, perhaps. Making it pair up well with the other late 90s mathematical psycho-drama: Darren Aronofsky's Pi) as well as there being ‘matched pairs’, I think the film also does a ‘three and three’ split between the characters as well.

Quentin, Holloway and Leaven are the previously societally ‘worthwhile’ characters whilst Rennes, Kazan and Worth are the previously societally ‘worthless’ figures. In a collective situation, as the cube is being a microcosm of, the purpose of the ‘worthwhile’ characters is not to spin dangerously off into their own brilliant but selfish worlds, but to reign themselves in for the good of all to be the guiding hands of the situation. Whilst the function of the ‘worthless’ characters is to be that anchor – the person in need and who has to be led to do the right thing (either through shaming or by force if necessary by the other three) because otherwise they would not do what is necessary to save the situation off their own bat.

In the perfect functioning society all of these characters would fulfil their pre-assigned roles in the situation with no issues, functioning like well oiled cogs in a machine. However as soon as actual human beings get introduced into the situation (like the Stanford Prison Experiment, which perhaps makes Cube a precursor to all the films from the 2000s that dealt with that situation directly) who may not neatly fit into those roles, or even recognise that they are supposed to be occupying a certain role, things simply do not work out that neatly, especially when something happens early on such as the removal of Rennes to dangerously unbalance what should otherwise have been a perfectly stripped back to its basics situation displaying lean and efficient emotionless logic into escalating arguments and violence.

[Murdoch]

Yes, I think the reason this movie remains captivating is because its characters are given these identities and then eventually latch on to those identities as a survival tactic. Unlike the torture porn era that followed Cube (at least in the movies from that genre that I saw), characters were often just fodder for gore and reactionary to the mutilations around them. In this film the characters carry with them their personas from the outside world and dig into them as a coping mechanism. It's telling that by the end, the danger is less the cube mechanism itself than Quentin's deranged violence.

Your mention of the Stanford Prison Experiment is on point. Cube feels like a deranged social experiment designed to push prisoners into becoming survivalists and latching onto the skills they most value. With Quentin it's his strength and killing to assert his dominance, for Holloway it's maternalism, for Leaven it's her intelligence and logic.

I should really rewatch this, it's been years and overall it is quite effective (even if I don't care for the ending).

[ntnon]

I watched the three of them, and felt that the hypercube sci-fi aspect of the second was a misguided futuristic touch that nevertheless had some interesting perspectives to share about how human nature is impacted by theories of pre-determinism and futility (etc.).

The third, a mostly-prequel was curious for attempting to partway explain the experiment and choice of victims, even if it also blurred the lines between reality and fiction (watching dreams, memory erasing) and had the broadest villain in the series. The religion aspect seemed odd, and the ending so improbable that it suggests it wasn't real.

Overall, I felt the acting was strong in the second and couldn't decide whether naming the first film's characters (mostly?) after famous prisons was an in-joke, a coincidence or some type of commentary on the nature of something..