Midweek Mention... Cube
Welcome back to Bad Dads Film Review! This week, we’re descending into the mind-bending, minimalist sci-fi thriller that is Cube (1997). A cult favourite from Canadian director Vincenzo Natali, this low-budget psychological puzzle box is as disorienting and claustrophobic as it is thought-provoking.
Cube begins in medias res: a group of strangers wakes up in a strange, sterile room with hatches on all six sides. Each door leads to another nearly identical room—some are safe, others are lethal traps. No one knows how or why they’re there. The group includes a cop, a doctor, an escape artist, a math whiz, a paranoid conspiracy theorist, and an autistic man with extraordinary numerical abilities.
What unfolds is part escape room, part social experiment, as they try to survive—and escape—the Cube.
Cube is rich in metaphor and minimal in exposition. It avoids explaining who built the structure or why, focusing instead on how ordinary people behave under extreme pressure. As the group’s dynamic shifts, alliances form and collapse, revealing how quickly fear and distrust take hold.
The traps are inventive (acid spray, wire slicing, sound-activated death rooms), but the real tension comes from the breakdown of civility and the slow unravelling of each character’s psyche. The cube itself becomes a symbol of bureaucracy, control, and the meaningless complexity of modern systems.
And the maths—there’s a lot of maths. Prime numbers, Cartesian coordinates, permutations. It’s as if Saw, Waiting for Godot, and a high school algebra textbook all collided.
🎭 Why It Works
- Tight Concept: With one main set (re-lit in different colours), the film turns its limitation into a strength, heightening the claustrophobia and disorientation.
- Atmosphere: The sterile design, synth score, and total lack of context contribute to a deeply unsettling tone.
- Character Study: The real danger isn’t always the Cube—it’s the people inside it. Watching the moral descent is part of the thrill.
🧒 A Dad’s Take
This one’s definitely not for the younger kids—Cube is violent, bleak, and existentially harrowing. But for older teens and grown-ups, it’s a great entry into lo-fi sci-fi that provokes more thought than jump scares. Ideal for fans of The Twilight Zone, The Platform, or Escape Room, it asks the big question: what would you do if no one was watching—and you might not make it out?
Cube remains a sharp, unsettling mystery box of a film. It’s not about finding answers—it’s about watching how far people will go to survive when the rules no longer make sense. If you’re in the mood for a tight, cerebral thriller that’s as much philosophy as it is suspense, this one’s worth stepping into… just be careful which door you open. 🎬🧠👨👧👦🍿
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Until next time, we remain...
Bad Dads
Cube
Sidey: Blobby is a cube shape, isn't he?
Reegs: Well,
Sidey: A shape. A shape. Shape. Blob is a shape. He's a shape. Yeah. 'Cause this is the start of shape week. Yes. Yeah. I did search 'cause I was like certain, I think we've just done more specific. Shapes Yeah. Than the generic.
Reegs: Have we have we, we've done like a squared week or something, or a circle week.
Have we?
Sidey: well, we did loops and I'm think, I don't know. Anyway, decided to keep track of these things these days. Yeah. But starting off Riggs your nomination cube. Yeah. From way back in 1997, the year we finished school.
Reegs: Yeah. Yeah. And I remember seeing this not long after it came out
Sidey: Same, same.
Reegs: Which is not bad 'cause it was a, like a real low budget Canadian sci-fi independent movie.
Sidey: Do you wanna know the budget?
Reegs: Yeah. Go and tell me.
Sidey: 365,000 Canadian dollars.
Reegs: My goodness me.
Sidey: looks great. Yeah, for that.
I dunno what that converts to in GBP pounds,
Reegs: Well, Canadian dollars. That's probably about 20 quid, isn't it? I mean, it's, yeah. it starts with a closeup of [00:01:00] someone's eye, like any good independent thriller does. And then we kind of zoom out to see a guy named Alderon. We know that 'cause he's wearing a boiler suit and he's coming round from being unconscious on the floor of what. You very quickly establish it is the titular cube six sort of small vault type access exits on the ceiling and floor and all the walls and it's white.
And he opens one of them, one of the hatches, and he sees a crawl space through to like an identical looking room, but all in blue. And he looks, looks at that and decides to look in one of the others, an identical looking room, but all in red, a green one. He picks the orange one, I think, and he just goes into it and he sort of like nervously looks around and everything seems like it's all right.
And he takes a step forward and then is basically just cut into cubes
Sidey: of hear a noise first, don't you?
Reegs: wire. Yeah.
Sidey: You hear a,
Reegs: Yeah.
and he
Sidey: he kind of pauses and then like you say, just.
Falls. It's, it's, I think it's my, still my favorite screen. Death of all time. Where he's
Reegs: he's like, he's [00:02:00] diced. Yeah.
Sidey: It's so grim.
Reegs: so, really horrible and it fades to white and then the title comes up, cube and then we jump back to another room and we meet like our sort of hosts through this sort of weird setup that we've got.
'cause there's kind of no explanation really for this cube or what anything is.
Sidey: No, it's tele mystery.
Reegs: We meet the main protagonist, Quentin, a police officer. We've got Wirth, who's an obviously shady kind of architect right from the beginning. There's Holloway, a doctor Ren, who will come to find out is actually an escape artist, a prison escape artist escape, notorious prison escape artist and Levin.
And I didn't know this at the time, but I read it afterwards, but all the characters are named after prisons.
Sidey: Oh, right. No, I didn't know that. I suppose, yeah. Leavenworth. Yeah. Holloway, yeah. Okay. San Quentin. Yeah. And they're all kind of, they establish that they've all got a particular skillset.
Reegs: Yeah. Well, I mean, they start commenting on it. 'cause it's a, it's like real [00:03:00] philosoph philosophical because they, I mean at first they're just like, come, they come through the rims to meet with.
Quentin is the first one that we meet and then the others come in. So they already know about the traps. Ren with the, has figured out that he, he throws a boot in, he can trigger some of the traps first. So he is like throwing boots into the rooms and all this sort of stuff. And they also established that they don't know how they really got there.
They were just like eating dinner or they were in bed or they were out to dinner or whatever.
Sidey: we've seen this in other films, haven't we?
I was thinking of is it predators where they appear on a planet and none of them know how they've got there. They've been kind of abducted to take part in this sort of Yeah. Hideous thing, which is sort of like this,
Reegs: They quickly get onto speculating as to like, what the fuck is going on? Like, you know, they're like, oh, is it aliens? Is it you know, are they the toys of some like rich psychopath
Sidey: like a sore
Reegs: there, like a sore type vibe. And as they talk there's this like mechanical moving sound that occurs in the background was actually, it becomes plot.
Part of the plot, but it was actually because they were filmed at a train station [00:04:00] and the, or near a train station and the warehouse they were in was shaking 'cause of anyway so, we establish then that the rooms are not just kind of. Motion sensor driven or whatever, when Ren this notorious escape artist that Quentin recognizes 'cause he's a copper, he gets like, has this hideous acid spray like dissolved in his face.
It's really horrible. And then Levin, who's the mathematical student, it's like when they're talking about the reasons that they're all there, she then starts noticing that they've got numbers that connect the. Rims to each other and she starts working out. The prime numbers appear to be a safe route.
So they start making their way, like with more purpose then through this cube like structure, rim to rim.
Sidey: Yeah. They're also able to calculate by working out the dimensions. Yeah. How many rooms there must be. Yes. And it's vast, like it's over
Reegs: I've got a 17,100 and [00:05:00] 17,576. So anyway, a lot of stuff starts happening.
We get introduced to a character Kaan, who is a kind of. You wouldn't write this character or portray it as it is now, but he's, I I think they would describe it as mentally challenged back in those days. It's some kind of hybrid, but he's got autism because he's got
Sidey: savant, kind of it's s
Reegs: tendencies,
Sidey: beautiful mind.
Reegs: Yeah. But he's very, you know, he's barely got any communication. He just echo, he just kind of repeats stuff that he hears and that sort of thing. Yeah. And he gets brought into the group and is obviously a bit of. Sort of tension around having a guy like that, being part of the crew, because it could be difficult as well for various reasons, especially when there's a sound room, a room later that's triggered by sound. It also starts to come out that Wir one of the guys there, I. Knows more about this shit than he's letting on. And it turns out he built part of the, he designed part of the cube. It was a cushy gig working for [00:06:00] the government. And after all this speculation, it basically turns out that it wasn't like.
Some aliens, and it wasn't rich psychopaths, it was basically a bureaucratic project that got out of control and there's kind of nobody at the helm, it's all like this really pointless thing. So anyway, it, the plot rounds up with, you know, a couple of people being killed off and then Quentin becoming the bad guy basically.
It turns out he was more and more, you know, getting more and more abusive. They work out a path towards. How to get towards the the edge using Kazan's knowledge of being able to calculate the primes of powered numbers in his head. I think he can work out the the route to the edge.
And a couple of people get killed off Holloway. The doctor Quentin, like drops her to her death. It's really horrible.
Sidey: Deliberately, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Reegs: And so that's when he starts turning into the bad guy because it kind of becomes, you know, more about our humanity's worse than the,
Sidey: Yeah. We've seen this a million [00:07:00] times. Yeah.
Reegs: thing.
And it ends with basically them all kind of dying except for Kazan, who makes it to the bright white light of the exit. A fin the end of the, the, the film. Yeah.
Sidey: I think it looks fucking really good. So around this time was when I had been doing media studies for a level and had been sort of exposed to different kind of movies and just taken an interest in it myself.
And so I was watching stuff like this that we wouldn't get over here at the cinema or anything like that, but just searching stuff like this and really like this when I saw it back then. It's great.
Reegs: It's got a good aesthetic. It makes good use of, its like really limited budget.
And it's like vision of the cube being the product of a bureaucracy that's gone mad is like. Really great. I really like that. I
Sidey: It's much more interesting than it just being some guy.
Reegs: Yeah. And then the classic theme of humans revealing themselves to be a bigger threat than the cube itself is good, but the acting is not all that great.
None of the actors have got much in the way of screen presence really. And the dialogue is [00:08:00] often a bit sort of awkward, but it's such a good premise that you can't help but enjoy it.
Sidey: Yeah. I think you can forgive all of that stuff 'cause I think it really works. It's one of the only films I can think of that's filmed in. Color sequence.
Reegs: Is it?
Sidey: Yeah. So it's not chronological or
Reegs: Oh, yes. No, I read this
Sidey: they didn't have enough money. They had to, it was one, it's just one, obviously one room. Yeah. And they had to change their like gel things that go behind the, so they'd be, you know, clear windows and they just have to put these different colors on. Yeah. And it was obviously time seeming difficult, so they'd have to film
all the
Reegs: All the orange
Sidey: then all,
Reegs: the red ones. Oh my goodness me. Yeah. And it was probably on a shi, a tight, tight shooting
Sidey: 20 days.
20 days to to film. Yeah.
Reegs: Yeah. So the director of Chen Naali, he did go on to probably the biggest out of anybody in this. He did Splice, which was another horror, horror movie, and in the tall grass amongst others.
Plus he did a load of good TV stuff. I think maybe something like True Detective or something like that. So real. [00:09:00] Prestige tv. He, yeah. So the director was the one
Sidey: There's sequels as well, isn't there?
Reegs: There is I've seen them all. Apart from the Japanese remake of the cube that came out a couple of years ago,
Sidey: it the same director who did the, stayed on for the remakes?
Reegs: The, it was all
Sidey: I bowed out.
Are they good? Worth a look.
Reegs: Not well, yes and no. Just if you like the idea, it does expand upon it, but obviously the more you know about it, the less interesting it gets.
Sidey: Yeah. I suppose. Yeah. Yeah, I enjoyed it. I didn't recognize anyone that was in it at the time. I don't know
Reegs: No, I don't think acting wise anybody came out of it with anything really.
Sidey: The visual effects people did all the work for free.
Because they wanted to support the Toronto film industry. That's where this was made.
Reegs: There were a couple of occasions where that looked to have been a bit of a ripoff, to be honest, where they had the shaking camera effect when the cube was moving was pretty
Sidey: pretty star trekky. Yeah. But to me this is a strong recommend.
Reegs: Yeah, absolutely.
