Cube — The Deadly Trap

"The year 1998 will not be remembered as the annus mirabilis of Canadian cinema — that dubious honor belongs to the avalanche of slacker movies featuring pot-smoking in Toronto basements —, but it will be remembered as the year Vincenzo Natali, a young director with more ideas than budget, decided to lock six unfortunate souls in a labyrinth of steel and architectural sadism. Cube was not born out of thin air: it was the rotten fruit of a northern film industry so austere that even special effects seemed to be made with cardboard and duct tape. But, oh surprise, that same precariousness became its greatest virtue. Natali, a former student of the Canadian Film Centre — that talent incubator where both geniuses and yogurt commercial directors are bred —, achieved the impossible: creating a claustrophobic nightmare with less money than a Vancouver coffee costs and more tension than a David Lynch-directed episode of The Twilight Zone on a bad day.