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Rating:
We Westerners, accustomed by centuries of Latin and Greek influences (which laid the foundations of modern dramaturgy), conceive stories with a beginning, a development, and an end.
However, within the vast array of films available, one may stumble upon movies like this one, CUBE (1997) by Italo-Canadian Vincenzo Natali. This is a film that effectively HAS NO beginning, it is a cross between a basic psychology treatise, a sci-fi film, and an outline of military strategy applied to human behavior in extreme situations.
The story follows six characters who find themselves, without reason or explanation, in a "symbolic" environment, devoid of any element familiar to the protagonists, trapped in a sort of "non-Place" from which they must find the only possible way out.
A "puzzle" film where for every trial overcome, more physical and psychological challenges are taken on. And so, amid traps, tricks, charades, and puzzles, the six individuals, through brotherhoods, betrayals, deceptions, and new alliances, will be decimated until only one manages to find the escape route.
An anxiogenic, claustrophobic, hallucinatory, and ruthless film which explores a wide range of emotions, from hatred to love, passing through betrayal and conspiracy, but also hides a second layer of reading beyond the proper entertainment film.
The film seems, in fact, to represent the History of Humanity, cruelty in its becoming, in a symbolism truly unique of its kind, which makes us understand how intricate and complex the web of relationships between people is (especially among people who do NOT know each other) and how difficult it is to relate and lead a group of people in making bold decisions and choices, particularly when the very life of the group and the individual members is at stake.
This CUBE, if you will, is an abstract concept that represents the adversities of life itself, in a network of interrelated connections in a relentless logic (and often non-logic) that allows no errors or distractions. The rules of the cube are simple: the sole objective is to escape the stress; every rule is valid, every theory, every means, every detail, all obviously within the bounds of common coexistence (at least at the beginning!).
A massacre game that, while initially safeguarding a certain decorum in relationships, slowly reveals the more instinctive and base sides of the survivors, increasingly fewer in number and more interested in saving their own skins! Those who make mistakes pay, and there is no delegation or way to escape one's responsibilities.
A low-budget film conceived on an original and startling IDEA (no set design apart from the interior of the CUBE), dynamic and swift DIRECTION, and a SCRIPT that splits hairs. A truly engaging and credible cast completes the whole, managing to convey the anxiety that gradually takes over each of them.
A film that also involves us, brave spectators, and raises our awareness of how there might exist a kind of Higher Order of things manipulating the world and altering the skewed relationship between cause and effect at its pleasure, in a kind of chessboard that often moves its pieces without reason, leaving us feeling, most of the time, helpless in the face of the inevitability of events.
For me, A MASTERPIECE of logic, ingenuity, action, and pathos... in short, in a phrase: “poor” cinema but rich in ideas and intelligence!
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