Directed by Vincenzo Natali.
The cliché goes that you damn a film by praising the sets, but not in this case.
It’s the set is what makes it so good. Its a great gimmick.
Imagine a giant cubical maze made out of nearly identical cells. That way you can have one set which is cheap to construct and use it in a way to make it look like dozens.
Voila! You’ve got a movie that looks like it cost ten times as much as it really did. Definatly cool!
With the gimmick in place and a couple of neat special effects[the movie starts with a fellow (Julian Richings)getting diced into bite-sized chunks], we get down to the real reason for the film, a study in character development.
The film begins with the protaganist, a cop named Quentin(Maurice Dean Wint) landing in the aformentioned set on top of another fellow named Worth(David Hewlett). They are angry and confused in the situation, and they are soon joined by some other people:Levin(Nicole deBoer), a high school student , a doctor named Holloway(Nicky Guadagni) a master thief named Rennes(Wayne Robson)and a idiot savant named Kazan(Andrew Miller).
A team of some sort has been set up. It’s clear the object of this life and death game is to get out alive with as few casualties as possible. But the problem is that, aside from the booby traps, the members of this bunch are clearly incompatible with each other.
The question finally becomes: will the members of the group wind up killing each other before the booby traps do, or will everybody make it out alive?
who’s going to crack first? All the actors give decent to memerable performances, and it’s interesting seeing good guys become bad guys and vice versa as the strain becomes a bit too much and nerves frey.
The violence is mostly of the cartoon kind, and there really isn’t much of it. This film isn’t for everybody, it gets intense at times.
But those who enjoy a good fright and good writing this is a pretty good bet.
