Director Report Card: Vincenzo Natali (1997)

Vincenzo Natali has, for many years now, being one of my go-to answers when asked to name an underrated director. Born in Detroit, but living in Canada his entire life, he's been putting together clever genre indies for two decades now. His movies often combine interesting ideas with big themes without sacrificing the thrills we want from our horror or sci-fi stories. They're also almost always low-budget productions that use their lack of funds as a feature, not a bug. He's done all of this too without getting a lot of mainstream press. (Though he has won a faithful cult following.) As I'm just about ready to kick off the Halloween season, now seems like a good time to revisit Natali's career. 

1. Cube

The germ of “Cube” was first planted in Vincenzo Natali's head in the early nineties, when he wanted to make a movie about people trapped in Hell. A few years later, Natali was working as at Nelvana, doing storyboard art on cartoon shows like “Eek! The Cat,” “Babar,” and “Beetlejuice.” It was during this time that he developed his germ of an idea into a screenplay about people trying to escape a maze-like cube while pursued by a monster.  After fine-tuning the script more, Natali would make a similarly themed short about people trapped in an elevator to raise money. “Elevated” impressed investors and “Cube” rolled into production.

A man in a prison style jumpsuits awakens in a cube-shaped room. He exits through a door in the wall and enters another, nearly identical room... Where he's swiftly killed by a booby trap. Five unrelated strangers – a cop named Quentin, a math grad student named Leaven, a doctor named Holloway, and a cynic named Worth – awaken in a similar room. They soon deduce they are trapped in an enormous cube made up of these smalls rooms. Some rooms are safe while others have deadly traps in them. They discover two other people – an escape artist named Rennes and a mentally handicapped man named Kazan – as they move towards escaping. They attempt to navigate this structure, learning more about the clues left for them, but their personalities soon come into conflict. 

Just from a budgetary perspective, “Cube” has to go down in indie movie history as a most brilliant production. Nearly the entire movie takes place on one set: A simple metallic box with doors on each wall. That same room was redressed and lit with different colors in a few varying ways. This created the illusion that one room was actually hundreds of rooms. That's how Natali was able to make this entire movie for less than 400,000 dollars. Yet, by cooking this budgetary limit into the very premise of the screenplay, the viewer of “Cube” never even notices the limited resources the crew had to work with. It's a clever act of movie-making magic.

“Cube” also has the kind of narrative hook that immediately catches an audience's attention. We are dropped into this story with no explanation for anything that is happening. We don't know how the characters got in the cube. We don't know who built it or for what purpose. We don't even know what time period we are in, if it's the present day or some undetermined point in the future. We are thrusted into this wild situation with this group of characters, who have to unravel the few clues they are presented with. Watching this motley crew figure out more details about their prison – the subtle hints to which rooms are trapped and which aren't, the exact nature of the cube's structure – is absolutely compelling.

But here's the best trick “Cube” is hiding up its four-cornered sleeve: The mystery ultimately doesn't matter. No permanent answers to the question of what forces set this story in motion are provided. That is totally outside the movie's scope, which is strictly focused on the people stuck in this hellish situation. The viewer knows exactly as much as the characters do. They make their guesses, suggesting the cube is the work of the military, sicko billionaires, or some leftover government project. None of these theories are either proven or disproven. This creates a mystery far more compelling than anything the writers could have come right out and say. “Cube” brilliantly fires the imagination by suggesting way more than its limited budget ever could've shown.

The real reason the film makes no attempt to provide a backstory is because that's not what the story is really about. “Cube” is about how different people, motivated by different philosophies, react in times of crisis. Quentin is an authoritarian cop. This at first makes him a useful leader, devising plans and moving forward. Yet, as he grows more frustrated, his inability to see things from other people's perspective – and his reliance on brute force – makes him unhinged. Holloway believes in helping people but is also prone to outlandish conspiracy theories. Worth is a nihilist, who is unwilling to do much of anything at first. Rennes is the kind of person who believes in direct solutions to direct problems, which leaves him totally unprepared for the changing environment of “Cube.” Which is why he dies first. Honestly, you could probably write a pretty compelling philosophy paper about “Cube.” The film contains that level of richness within its simple ideas.

You could argue that reducing characters down to easily understood philosophies makes them something of archetypes. And that's a fair criticism. Yet it also misses part of what makes “Cube” so scary. The characters being easy to understand makes “Cube's” premise universal. It's extremely easy to watch this movie and imagine yourself or your friends in the same situation. To think about how you'd fair in this exact scenario. Through that window, the movie addresses how everyone and anyone can adapt to a crisis. (I, for one, would die very quickly, as no food or water is provided to the prisoners and I'm completely useless on an empty stomach.) This is probably why the movie's most everyman-like character – college student Leaven – is its most likable and personable. 

Here's the other thing about “Cube.” Its ideas aren't just intellectually stimulating. The movie is simply cool and clever. “Cube” is a horror movie too and it presents the viewer with a number of inventively gory set-pieces. The opening scene could operate as a grim short film, showing an unnamed man moving from one silent room to another... Until a giant wall of wires, moving so quickly it's almost invisible, slices him into a pile of bloody squares. Those slicing wires reappear later, almost spiraling around someone. Other clever methods of execution on display here includes sound-activated walls of spikes, hidden flamethrowers, and spraying acid. “Cube” gets you thinking but it also provides some sick-and-twisted horror movie thrills.

Yet “Cube” doesn't just throw in some creative butchery, like many of the "Saw"-era flicks it unknowingly inspired. Natali is extremely talented at generating suspense as well. The unpredictability built into the premise, that the characters frequently aren't sure what waits for them in any given room, creates a lot of tension. Two sequences are the centerpiece of the movie, as far as suspense goes. The first occurs when the cast navigates through the room with sound-activated spikes. They all hold their breath, moving slowly, in hopes of not alerting the sensors. You tensely watch and wait for the moment someone screws up. That scene is awesome and probably the best in the movie, though another moment – when characters are attempting to cross a gap in the cubes – successfully ramps up the suspense too.

As many good ideas as Vincenzo Natali had for “Cube,” eventually he does run out of them. The film's climax proves more than a little messy. The characters come as close as possible to cracking the math behind the cube's layout, approaching the exit. Quentin grows increasingly unhinged, becoming the movie's villain. He re-enters after a brief departure, acting like a masked slasher killer and wielding a giant spike like a dagger. I've got nothing against slasher movie shenanigans but they feel out of place here. It's sort of disappointing that a film with so many clever ideas would, in its final stage, designate one character as a clear bad guy and have him cut through the remaining cast members. I guess if the choice was between climatic carnage and spoiling the story's wonderful ambiguity, this is preferable.

For the most part, “Cube's” visual design is as clever as its screenplay. Save for a couple of tacky whip-pans and some shaky-cam in the last act, Natali's direction is fantastic. He knows how to quickly establish each room without revealing that it's all one set. The pans around the simple box-shaped locations prove surprisingly stylish. The sudden reveals of the various traps all come off as nice surprises. The movie also has fantastic sound design, the quietness of the setting quickly creating an unsettling effect. (Which is further boosted by a sparse but creepy score from Mark Korven.)

Being a low-budget film that is also unabashedly Canadian – characters say “zed” and “merde” – you won't be surprised to read most of the cast is filled with veteran TV actors. Nicole de Boer, probably best known for her work on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” plays Leaven as someone who would likely be really sweet if she wasn't in a crazy situation. She shows an obvious vulnerable side, panicking well, without coming off as unreasonable or annoying. David Hewlett as Worth, is the closest thing the movie has to a “name” talent. It's impressive that Hewlett manages to make Worth so likable while also acknowledging that he's a bit of a pervert and a jerk. Maurice Dean Wint is intimidating at Quentin. Nicky Guadagni is empathetic as Holloway while also showing the character's flaws. The cast makes all the right decision, elevating what are simply written characters to more complex roles.

“Cube” would begin to play festivals in late 1997, where it quickly started to grab attention. The movie would frequently play on TV – I can recall at least one heavily advertised airing on the Sci-Fi Channel – and would also prove popular on DVD. (Which is where I first saw it.) The movie's mixture of grim thrills, inventive violence, and an engrossing premise would quickly win it a cult following. It's a movie that I've grown to love more with repeated re-watches, as “Cube” has enough surprises and layers to reward multiple viewings. It's the definition of an indie gem, an exceptionally clever movie that rises above its low-budget roots to find an audience all over the world. [Grade: A-]