Plenty of filmmakers attempt to make a bold breakthrough feature debut without the resources to go beyond a handful of cast members and a single central location. Very few, though, manage to pull off something as gripping as Vincenzo Natali's Cube. Years before the relatively high budget (for a Canadian sci-fi horror) Splice, Natali ingeniously created a plot wherein his protagonists spend the entire movie trapped in a series of cube shaped rooms, moving from one to another simply by re-dressing and re-lighting the same basic set. Natali cites classic toys in a bin Twilight Zone episode Five Characters In Search Of An Exit as the story's inspiration, but really the premise is a simple, perennially popular one: five disparate characters are trapped in a space with no idea how they got there, why they are there or how to escape. A similar concept was the jumping off point for Saw a few years later, but as that moved from short to feature to franchise the scope widened considerably. Natali's strength is keeping the action focused on its limited, claustrophobic, indoor space and keeping the narrative tension up all the time. Like Saw the characters must negotiate deadly puzzles and traps to escape. Unlike Saw these death traps have a mathematical bent, leaving Spanish thriller Fermat's Room a more obvious legacy of Cube's success. That the characters - varying from a maths student to an autistic savant to an escape artist - have just the appropriate skillset to negotiate this twisted gameshow set up just adds to the tension between them as it requires a level of cooperation with which they sometimes struggle. In this character struggle and paranoia Cube's very low budget sometimes shows through in some less than stellar acting performances, but the innovative design and direction carry it through where many films with tens of times the budget flounder.