Review | Cube movie review: Japanese remake of cult escape-room classic that paved the way for Saw is a big disappointment
- Starring Masaki Suda, Anne Watanabe and Takumi Saitoh, Yasuhiko Shimizu’s film is a remake of the 1997 movie of the same name from Canadian Vincenzo Natali
- The movie is so repetitive and sluggish, and the characters so insufferable, that being stuck in the deadly cube might seem preferable to watching it

2/5 stars
Twenty five years ago, Canadian filmmaker Vincenzo Natali created the escape-room genre with his low-budget science-fiction thriller Cube. As if in a quarantining traveller’s worst nightmare, a group of strangers awake in a mysterious labyrinth of interconnected box-shaped rooms, some of which are booby-trapped.
The 1997 film became something of a cult hit, spawning both a sequel and a prequel and laying the foundations for the Saw franchise that exploited a similar scenario.
Now, with Natali on board as a consultant, videographer turned filmmaker Yasuhiko Shimizu delivers an official Japanese remake that remains slavishly faithful to the original premise but reimagines the characters for a local audience.
Masaki Suda, Anne Watanabe and Takumi Saitoh headline as three of the prisoners, none of whom can recollect how they came to be in their current predicament. Ide (Saitoh) emerges as the group’s natural leader, maintaining a cool head and devising an effective method for testing each new cube for traps.
The engineering background of Goto (Suda) soon comes into play, but friction develops between Ando (Kotaro Yoshida), the group’s eldest member, and slacker Ochi (Masaki Okada).