Cube (1997, Vincenzo Natali) (Patreon)

45/100

Other warning signs had appeared earlier, but here's the moment when I knew for sure that any hope of getting squared with Cube was futile. Leaven, the math whiz, has come up with a working hypothesis regarding the serial numbers at the entrance to each room. Prime numbers signify a lethal booby trap, she theorizes. I briefly get excited at the prospect that I'm watching a bona fide puzzle movie, rather than just a Jigsaw-free progenitor of the Saw franchise. Leaven now has to use her big brain to quickly determine whether or not a given three-digit number is prime. I neglected to write down the first one but let's say it's 259 (which is 37 x 7). She thinks for a few seconds, says "No."

The next number is 372.

And the super math genius thinks for a few seconds.

Pity, because had Natali and his cowriters put some genuine thought into devising clever challenges for what's essentially Escape Room(s) (well before escape rooms were even a thing), it'd likely have been a real guilty pleasure for me, irrespective of the oh-let's-say-variable acting and the single chintzy set with its rotating colored gels. (Why the truly ugly transistor-ish pattern, by the way? Seems arbitrary.) Instead, it expends much of its energy on tedious shouting matches among single-trait caricatures, plus some truly nonsensical efforts to rationalize the cube's existence and (lack of) purpose. Tried to find a metaphor in the sadistic meaninglessness—some real-world analogue of a destructive tool created for no apparent reason and then utilized "because it's there"—but not even military weapons work that way. Better to just leave it a mystery. Not a total bust: The "cold open" is memorably disorienting/grotesque, and legitimate suspense gets milked when they have to cross the sound-triggered death room. Compared to the creepy elegance of Natali's subsequent work (especially Cypher, which I kinda love), however, it feels like amateur hour. Maybe Hypercube is more my speed? I know Alison Willmore is obsessed with that one.