Fantasia will bestow the 2024 Canadian Trailblazer Award on visionary filmmaker Vincenzo Natali, whose landmark 1997 debut Cube blew open the doors on what became a new wave of individual and provocative Canuck genre works.
I love escape room horror due to Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997), a trendsetting movie that was a turning point for Canadian horror and paved a new path for terror worldwide. The concept was simple – a group of seemingly unrelated individuals wake up in a room before quickly discovering they’re inside some kind of perverse maze. In Vincenzo Natali’s world, the mysterious yet deadly prison keeps you hooked as you attempt to second-guess the next trap and how it will be activated or escaped.
There’s something for every kind of horror or film fan – mystery, gore, deception and intrigue all mixed into a big, geometrical cocktail. It’s an intriguing predecessor to Saw, one that set the template for a whole host of horrors to come, but where Saw would surrender a morsel of information to its games and reasoning, Cube is entirely silent. There’s little rhyme or reason as to why what’s happening is happening; all you can do is create your own interpretation of its origins. There are just five principal characters at play throughout Cube: a tough yet jaded cop, Quentin (Maurice Dean Wint), a clever young mathematician, Leaven (Nicole de Boer), a psychiatrist, Holloway (Nicky Guadagni), a professional escape artist, Renne (Wayne Robson), and thoughtful architect Worth (David Hewlett). You might be thinking, ‘Wow, this sounds like a Twilight Zone episode!’ in part, you’d be right, as Five Characters in Search of an Exit was an inspiration.
Watching Cube is akin to receiving a mysterious parcel you weren’t expecting through the post. If you’re skilled, you can figure out what’s in your package before opening it, but there is always a risk of a nasty surprise. Despite there being over 20 rooms, the production design merely redressed the singular room set they had every time, using inventive lighting, camera angles, close-ups and creative set design to throw the audience off balance. It’s certainly one way to keep production costs down, but it also creates a cinematic vision of M. C. Escher’s famous artwork, Relativity, as each cube is held in a strange hypnotic dance of reality versus illusion.
That’s part of the reason Cube is so engaging—you’re only ever given as much information as those trapped inside, so in a way, you’re just another person trapped in a maze of malicious intent. Cube is mind-bending, groundbreaking, and defiant. It’s the movie that sparked cost-conscious, inventive confinement horrors and ushered in a revolution in late 90s horror film design.
A new 4K restoration of Cube is showing at Fantasia International Film Festival on July 30.
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