Hypercube, or Cube 2, is (of course) the sequel to Cube. The films share a minimal, elegant SF/horror premise. A bunch of people are trapped in a series of cubical rooms. The rooms are basically empty and featureless. Each room has six exits, one in the middle of each side (including the floor and the ceiling) which lead to similar empty cubical rooms. Various murderous threats appear in certain rooms; the characters also get tenser and tenser, and somtimes break down, or turn against one another. You have a combination of abstract mathematical patterns – a sort of modernist architecture theme gone mad through its own excessive purity – and psychological tension, people pushed to the point of nervous collapse. In Hypercube, the sadism of modernist geometry (everything white, with no irregularities or distinguishing features) is multiplied by the cruel unpredictability of quantum weirdness (postmodern? quantum theory is modernist, early 20th century; but here it is invoked, not very rigorously, as the justification for all sorts of twisted and trippy – as in a bad trip – video effects) as the victims find themselves in a tesseract (the equivalent, in four spatial dimensions, of a cube in three dimensions, or a square in two). Space folds back on itself, time contracts and dilates, and people encounter alternate versions of themselves. There’s no way out, of course, but only interminable waiting, or else actual death; both Cube films could be described as pulp versions of Beckett, and all the better for their mixture of high intellectual concept and trash TV psychology. The affect of Hypercube is an odd combination of icy distance and a sort of free-floating dread, too unfocused, abstract, and impersonal to be existential angst, but too palpable, too tactile, to be dismissed. A chillingly creepy experience; low-budget trash-art at its best.
Hypercube
Hypercube, or Cube 2, is (of course) the sequel to Cube. The films share a minimal, elegant SF/horror premise. A bunch of people are trapped in a series of cubical rooms. The rooms are basically empty and featureless. Each room has six exits, one in the middle of each side (including the floor and the ceiling) which lead to similar empty cubical rooms. Various murderous threats appear in certain rooms; the characters also get tenser and tenser, and somtimes break down, or turn against one another. You have a combination of abstract mathematical patterns – a sort of modernist architecture theme gone mad through its own excessive purity – and psychological tension, people pushed to the point of nervous collapse. In Hypercube, the sadism of modernist geometry (everything white, with no irregularities or distinguishing features) is multiplied by the cruel unpredictability of quantum weirdness (postmodern? quantum theory is modernist, early 20th century; but here it is invoked, not very rigorously, as the justification for all sorts of twisted and trippy – as in a bad trip – video effects) as the victims find themselves in a tesseract (the equivalent, in four spatial dimensions, of a cube in three dimensions, or a square in two). Space folds back on itself, time contracts and dilates, and people encounter alternate versions of themselves. There’s no way out, of course, but only interminable waiting, or else actual death; both Cube films could be described as pulp versions of Beckett, and all the better for their mixture of high intellectual concept and trash TV psychology. The affect of Hypercube is an odd combination of icy distance and a sort of free-floating dread, too unfocused, abstract, and impersonal to be existential angst, but too palpable, too tactile, to be dismissed. A chillingly creepy experience; low-budget trash-art at its best.