Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 10 (Cube)

Oh, Canada. It's time to cover some homegrown horror, with a spooky minimalist film made in Canada! Hooray! It's an abstract film about a bunch of people stuck in a murder cube that refuses to define itself or its reason for being! Ah. You're throwing me into the deep end here, and forcing me to try and wrangle some symbolic deeper meaning from the film without just describing what goes on in it, I see. Or maybe there is no deeper design behind what the film is doing and it's just nihilist anarchy for its own sake, 80 minutes of cube murder and terrible people. Could be, could be! Or maybe... just maybe... I'm marking time until we get a sizeable opening paragraph to transition into what I took from the abstract murder cube movie. What could be the truth?

What I like about the movie is that its own nature does lend you to try and think about it in creative ways, rather than have it explained to you. We never learn the history or lore of the murder cube, who made it, why they put people into it, anything like that. The murder cube could be hell for all we know. In a way, it is; as a famous scholar once said, hell is other people. So, what of these people? The main ideological challenges inherent in the movie are nihilism vs existentialism, and the actualizing of one's self-worth in the world of a murder cube. Somehow this is all tied together and on-the-nose with the character literally surnamed Worth, who is a detached nihilist who is certain there's no escape from the murder cube because he designed its outer shell. Crucially, though, he does not want to just die to one of its numerous traps, and so works to try and escape. In a way, his nihilism gets to win. As I said, we never learn who made this cube or why they did this. The others seem to think there is a reason, but Worth just shrugs. Would knowing make any difference? They're still stuck in a murder cube and need to escape, focus on that instead of answering questions that don't matter.

As for the idea of self-worth, we have characters whose outlooks and skill sets help them to navigate the murder cube. Even Rennes, the prison escape expert who miscalculates and gets his face melted by acid, adds worth in his death by teaching the group how to check each cube room for booby traps. Levin (played by Nicole de Boer, who I remember from the Dead Zone TV series and who anyone who made it to the end of the Dominion War will remember from Deep Space Nine) is a math whiz who uses her skills to calculate where they are in the cube. Even Kazan, the intellectually disabled man who some of the characters consider dead weight, turns out to be a savant key to deciphering the complex math working the murder cube. In fact, the only person who doesn't have obvious self-worth is the one who turns out to be the worst of the bunch: Quentin, the cop who at first takes the role of team leader but gradually unwinds into a confrontational, sexist, ableist, willing-to-murder bully. So, in other words, a cop. Cube really went and said ACAB. In fact, Quentin's vengeance ends up beating the body count of the actual murder cube's booby traps.

Is the movie perfect? Good lord, no. It's just a little problematic, both with its portrayal of Kazan and that one word said again (albeit by Quentin) and with Quentin himself both being the only person of color in the film and the clear antagonist madman by the end. A lot of people seem to be really down on Cube, and it has to be said that it has its rough edges. Even so, I kind of liked what was put down here, and I'm certainly not the type to want a detailed explanation of who made the murder cube and why. They made a prequel to this movie and I bet that explains everything and makes it nice and neat and canonized for you lot. As for me, I'll take my ambiguously-designed murder cube with its musing on worth and existentialism, and say that it was not a bad spooky movie before moving on to the next one.