Montreal’s Fantasia Film Festival honored filmaker Vincenzo Natali with its 2024 Canadian Trailblazer at a screening of his influential 1997 film Cube, where Natali urged audiences to “take back weird” as a form of resistance against algorithm-driven entertainment.
Before screening a 4K restoration of the film, Fantasia artistic director Mitch Davis gave an enthusiastic crash-course introduction on the importance of Cube. The low-budget sci-fi thriller follows several people who must use grit and a whole lot of math to escape a series of rooms within a giant cube. Made for about $350,000 Canadian, it went on to make more than $9 million, and to spawn sequels, a 2021 Japanese remake, and a slew of imitators.
“You see its influences 10 years past it — in video games, in television shows, in a million independent films that ripped off the concept in different ways,” Davis explained.
But the film also opened up various Canadian government institutional funding programs to the potential of genre filmmaking, Davis said. Cube was released just a year after Fantasia’s founding, and genre cinema — from sci-fi to horror — has grown in influence and popularity alongside the festival as it has become one of the premier genre festivals in the world.
Davis explained: “Of course, Cube came out and was a huge critical success, but also sold in every territory in the f—ing world, and reminded the institutional bodies that genre cinema — when it’s smart, when it’s original, when it has a point of view — has an enormous audience that transcends all budgetary limitations, transcends cultures, does not need a star because the concept is the star.”
Though they weren’t big names at the time, Cube did launch several actors’ careers, including that of Natali’s longtime friend David Hewlett, who joined Davis and Natali for the screening Tuesday night, and for a subsequent Q&A.
Natali and Hewlett explained how the film — which features Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson, and Maurice Dean Wint going through a series of booby-trapped rooms — was shot in just one-and-a-half rooms, which were lit and otherwise designed to appear different.
Cube opened the door to such acclaimed Canadian genre films as John Fawcett’s 2000 film Ginger Snaps and Jen and Sylvia Soska’s 2012 American Mary. It also launched Natali as a filmmaker whose credits include 2002’s Cypher and 2009’s Splice, as well as the TV shows Hannibal, The Strain, American Gods, and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, among many others.
Cube Director Vincenzo Natali on the Good Kind of Weird
Natali noted how unconventional Cube was upon its release, and called on audiences to embrace the weird. That’s no problem for Fantasia audiences, who thrive on the good kind of weird (not the kind of weird that has become, in recent days, an effective criticism in the U.S. elections a few kilometers south of Montreal.)
“I feel the weight of the algorithm descending upon my head,” Natali told his audience. “I feel like our culture and especially our film culture is kind of flattening under this sort of alien force that has invaded cinema. And I feel like you guys, and this festival in particular, are the answer to how we defeat this thing, this alien force, because you’re weird.”
The audience applauded.
“And the algorithm doesn’t understand weird. The algorithm is all about just taking a vast amount of information and finding a synthesis for it. But what makes cinema so important to us, all of us, is that it doesn’t do that. It does the opposite of that. It bends expectations and takes you somewhere where you never thought you would go.
“And that is what I’m most excited about as an audience member. That’s what I aspire to do as a filmmaker. And I really feel like that’s what this festival is about.”
He then went into the etymology of the word “weird,” noting that it has Germanic origins and originally meant “fate.” He referenced the “weird sisters,” or witches, in Macbeth.
“The weird sisters, the witches from Macbeth, were ‘weird’ because they predicted the future. And it was unsettling. It was strange. I think we should take back weird — make weird our fate, beat the algorithm and have a good time with it.”
The audience applauded again.