"Hell", to paraphrase philosophe and all-round general smart arse Jean Paul Sartre, "is being locked in a room with your friends". "Yeah", adds spacebum and all-round true Brit Dave Lister in Red Dwarf, "but all his mates were French." So sets the scene for Aquarium, the 2004 Frederic Grousset's low-budget (French – obviously – duh!) indie – except for the friends part; as ever when a desperate group of people are brought together in an unlikely scenario, they are all strangers.
Think Cube meets big brother. Six strangers awaken in a room with no idea how they got there. A single camera watches them, from behind which a monotone voice informs them they must partake in a series of tasks, with the last man or woman standing being allowed to leave. The losers won't get to leave because – well, they'll be dead.
As often in survival of the fittest scenarios, the real tension here comes doesn't come from the external threat, but from the possibility of your fellow sufferers turning on you at any second. Can you really work together to solve the problem when someone may knife you in the back any second? That's not to say there's not some fun to be had as the jail master ensures they toe the line. The fact that all of the prisoners can me incapacitated through anaesthetising gas pumped into the room means that any hint of insurrection results in a swift knockout for everyone, the captors enter the room, remove or punish the perpetrator, leave, re-seal the room and then wake everyone up, meaning that that group very quickly submits totally to their "hosts". One character tries to break the camera and awakes to find his finger sitting on the floor next to him. Money can't buy the kind of obedience that gives you.
The inhabitants don't hang about for long. They are swiftly despatched in between bouts of contemplation, bonding, arguing and fighting. Unfortunately, it's difficult to root for any of them as, despite a cursory background, most of the characters remain in 2-D, falling into "shrill harpies" or "shouting angry guy" roles.
The slightly washy visuals betray the low budget, but don't distract as badly as the few jarring edits that could have been avoided by keeping a better eye on continuity.
A tacked on ending lets the film down badly. It's as if Grousset decided at the last minute to try to make the whole film a metaphor for modern living. The final "twist" is fairly predictable and something at the end about a big corporation controlling various aspects of modern living really made no sense and detracts from what is otherwise a reasonably tense thriller.
Think Cube meets big brother. Six strangers awaken in a room with no idea how they got there. A single camera watches them, from behind which a monotone voice informs them they must partake in a series of tasks, with the last man or woman standing being allowed to leave. The losers won't get to leave because – well, they'll be dead.
As often in survival of the fittest scenarios, the real tension here comes doesn't come from the external threat, but from the possibility of your fellow sufferers turning on you at any second. Can you really work together to solve the problem when someone may knife you in the back any second? That's not to say there's not some fun to be had as the jail master ensures they toe the line. The fact that all of the prisoners can me incapacitated through anaesthetising gas pumped into the room means that any hint of insurrection results in a swift knockout for everyone, the captors enter the room, remove or punish the perpetrator, leave, re-seal the room and then wake everyone up, meaning that that group very quickly submits totally to their "hosts". One character tries to break the camera and awakes to find his finger sitting on the floor next to him. Money can't buy the kind of obedience that gives you.
The inhabitants don't hang about for long. They are swiftly despatched in between bouts of contemplation, bonding, arguing and fighting. Unfortunately, it's difficult to root for any of them as, despite a cursory background, most of the characters remain in 2-D, falling into "shrill harpies" or "shouting angry guy" roles.
The slightly washy visuals betray the low budget, but don't distract as badly as the few jarring edits that could have been avoided by keeping a better eye on continuity.
A tacked on ending lets the film down badly. It's as if Grousset decided at the last minute to try to make the whole film a metaphor for modern living. The final "twist" is fairly predictable and something at the end about a big corporation controlling various aspects of modern living really made no sense and detracts from what is otherwise a reasonably tense thriller.