A woman is in need of transportation, and finds it in the car of a mysterious man who picks her up. Before she knows it, she finds herself waking up in the middle of a mysterious artificial structure. She doesn’t know how she ended up there, but she has to get out anyway. To do this, she will have to slip through a series of mysterious conduits that, in addition to the exit, lead to a series of traps and dangers of various kinds from which she must survive. As if that were not enough, on her arm she has a luminous bracelet that shows a countdown.
With these elements as simple as they are powerful, ‘The tube‘, one of those direct proposals that go through the Sitges festival, have a discreet step in its cinematographic exhibition and find a certain relevance in streaming. In his case, his availability on Amazon Prime Video is giving him a second life with which to entertain the audience he wants a bit of horror movies without complexes.
The channels of terror
Directed by the French Mathieu Turi, who among his curriculum highlights his uncredited work in films such as ‘Inglourious Basterds’ or ‘Lucy’ as an assistant director. It is not that ‘El tube’ has many connections with those films, but it is true that the taste for the viscera and the violence of the first one in addition to the crazy science fiction of the second have their influence on the proposal of this French film.
However, the most immediate references that come to mind when watching ‘El tube’ are others. Above all is ‘Cube’, one of those films that came almost out of nowhere and has become seminal to many fantastic works of this century. The sudden appearance in a labyrinthine and futuristic installation full of traps is sustained by a urgent and mysterious component from which the film drinks constantly.
The other can be perfectly ‘Buried’. The Ryan Reynolds movie was also successful due to the intensity of the proposal, with a solo character trapped in a perfect trap from which he has to get out with what is closest to hand. A claustrophobic experience that still has a long way to go to reach the seminality of ‘Cube’, although his imprint is noticeable in films like this or another more successful French film such as ‘Oxygen’.
‘The tube’: elemental and frenetic
Clearly Turi knows where to look to make a proposal full of tension that appeals to coffee growers of genre cinema. The execution, however, is not always the most lucid, missing the opportunity to make an estimable cult jewel in the new and interesting French cinema. His way of developing the main character is not particularly exciting either, introducing decaffeinated traumas because they feel like procedures to be fulfilled instead of a fundamental part of the work.
It is, however, a worthy title to fill one of those afternoons of Holy Week where you don’t feel like swallowing a biblical turra. In just ninety minutes it has already dispatched you, it has you active with a series of puzzles as elementary as they are frantic and the claustrophobic component will surely be enormously attractive for more than one person.
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