[8] A product of the Canadian Film Centre's First Feature Project,[9] Nicole de Boer, Nicky Guadagni, David Hewlett, Andrew Miller, Julian Richings, Wayne Robson, and Maurice Dean Wint star as seven individuals trapped in a bizarre and deadly labyrinth of cube-shaped rooms.

Worth admits to Quentin he was hired to design the maze’s shell and guesses that The Cube was created accidentally by a bureaucracy, and that its original purpose has been forgotten and that they have only been placed inside to justify its existence.

Upon landing, Worth starts laughing hysterically; Rennes' corpse is in the room, proving they have moved in a circle.

Quentin is horrified, but Worth realizes the room Rennes died in has now moved to the edge of the maze, meaning they haven't gone in a circle at all.

[11] On casting Maurice Dean Wint as Quentin, Natali's cost-centric approach sought an actor for a split-personality role of hero and villain.

[15] In 1990, Natali had had the idea to make a film "set entirely in hell", but in 1994 while working as a storyboard artist's assistant at Canada's Nelvana animation studio, he completed the first script for Cube.

The initial draft had a more comedic tone, surreal images, a cannibal, edible moss growing on the walls, and a monster that roamed the Cube.

Roommate and childhood filmmaking partner Andre Bijelic helped Natali strip the central idea to its essence of people avoiding deadly traps in a maze.

Cinematographer Derek Rogers developed strategies for shooting in the tightly confined elevator, which he later reused on a Toronto soundstage for Cube.

[17] Casting started with Natali's friends, and budget limitations allowed for only one day of script reading prior to shooting.

[19] Natali considered the cash figure to be deceptive, because they deferred payment on goods and services, and got the special effects at no cost.

[22] Only one cube set was actually built, with each of its sides measuring 14 feet (4.3 m) in length, with only one working door that could actually support the weight of the actors.

Six colors of rooms were intended to match the recurring theme of six throughout the film; five sets of gel panels, plus pure white.

[24] The small set created technical problems for hosting a 30-person crew and a 6-person cast, becoming "a weird fusion between sci-fi and the guerrilla-style approach to filmmaking".

[27] During post-production, Natali spent months "on the aural environment", including appropriate sound effects of each room, so the Cube could feel like what he described as a haunted house.

The website's consensus reads: "Cube sometimes struggles with where to take its intriguing premise, but gripping pace and an impressive intelligence make it hard to turn away".

[33] Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle was highly critical: "If writer-director Vincenzo Natali, storyboard artist for Keanu Reeves's Johnny Mnemonic, were as comfortable with dialogue and dramatizing characters as he is with images, this first feature of his might have worked better".

[34] Nick Schager from Slant Magazine rated the film three out of five stars, noting that, its intriguing premise and initially chilling mood were undone by threadbare characterizations, and lack of a satisfying explanation for the cube's existence.

[35] Anita Gates of The New York Times was more positive, saying the story "proves surprisingly gripping, in the best Twilight Zone tradition.

The ensemble cast does an outstanding job on the cinematic equivalent of a bare stage... Everyone has his or her own theory about who is behind this peculiar imprisonment...

Vincenzo Natali, the film's fledgling director and co-writer, has delivered an allegory, too, about futility, about the necessity and certain betrayal of trust, about human beings who do not for a second have the luxury of doing nothing".

[8] Bloody Disgusting gave a positive review: "Shoddy acting and a semi-weak script can't hold this movie back.

[39] The film, and its concept of prisoners in identical rooms riddled with traps, is referenced in Liu Cixin's acclaimed in 2008 novel, "The Dark Forest", which is itself the sequel to Liu's prior Hugo Award winning novel, "The Three Body Problem", and is the name source of the "Dark Forest Hypothesis" response to to the Fermi Paradox concerning extraterrestrial life and Game Theory.