EYES
THE CUBE
The Cube is a film that manipulates reality by placing 7 complete strangers of widely varying personalities involuntarily in an endless Kafkaesque maze containing deadly traps. Due to the lack of variety of sets the filming relies greatly on the characters expressions to create the mood of the film. The director Vincenzo Natali, uses shots of eyes continuously to show the range of emotions the character’s experience as they gradually descend into madness as they are trapped in the cube and trying to work out how to escape. In fact the very first shot in the film is a close up of an eye.
The very first shot of the film involves a man waking up in a cube shaped room, immediately the audience sees the confusion and fear in the man’s eye, and hence this particular shot of eyes cements the overall sense of entrapment that the characters are feeling throughout the film. Natali utilises pupil dilation frequently throughout the film to portray the intense emotions the characters are feeling. Enlarged pupils indicate powerful emotions, including anger, suspicion, and deep thought, all of which are emotions experienced by every character in The Cube. Hence, close shots of the characters enlarged pupils is most effective to create the mood of the film.
An example of this particular filming of eyes is used when Leaven finds a broken piece of glass and realises that it belongs to her glasses that she broke at the beginning of the film. The filming zooms in on her eye as she places the broken piece of glass to fit the break in her glasses, and a wide sense of emotions can be seen in Leavens eyes as she goes from confusion to realisation and then fear as she understand the cubes have been moving and all the time they have spent trying to escape has been wasted.
