12 Sci-Fi Movies That Purposefully Mess With Your Head

Released in 1997, the horror-thriller-sci-fi hybrid Cube served as a stylish, unsettling calling card for director Vincenzo Natali, who would go on to helm everything from 2009’s underrated medical experimentation cautionary tale Splice to last year’s Joe Hill adaptation In The Tall Grass.

In a premise that would leave the likes of Franz Kafka and Jean Paul Sartre seething with jealousy at its ingenious simplicity, the film sees a set of mismatched characters awaken inside a small cube shaped room, with the group gradually progressing between shifting rooms of identical dimensions, whilst losing members to both the traps hidden in said rooms and mounting paranoia amongst its members.

And that’s it. We never learn how they ended up there, why this certain set of characters were chosen for this unfortunate fate, or what this is all in aid of. The film’s much maligned sequels began filling in some blanks, but in the process missed the purpose of Natali’s movie—the film is about how the social contract held between people falls apart under duress, rather than the specifics of this group’s brutal plight.