Texting has become a source of cinematic terror. In the griping psychological thriller Fermat’s Room, three brilliant mathematicians and an inventor are trapped in a locked room with a PDA. An unknown tormentor sends enigmatic questions in math or logic as text messages on the small screen. The prisoners have 60 seconds per question. If an answer isn’t forthcoming within that short window of time, the walls begin to close in from all sides. Death surrounds them. Before long, the hydraulic pumps behind the paneled walls may well flatten the prisoners like pancakes.
The film by Spanish writer-directors Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopena (out Sept. 29 on DVD) is a present-day descendent of Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of mystery and imagination. The situation and setting are Poesque. The four geniuses are invited separately by their mysterious host to solve an intriguing intellectual puzzle. They must cross a river in boat called Pythagoras, rowing past a castle tower rising from the water like a lone sentinel, and through a dark woods to a deserted warehouse resembling a set from Saw. Hidden inside the dank building is an elegantly appointed, windowless chamber where the visitors are lured to their doom—unless they can resolve the deadly puzzle of their confinement.
A suspenseful film of unexpected twists, Fermat’s Room peers into the dark lengths to which envy, jealousy and revenge can lead. Madness may wait along the path of contemplation into the infinitude of numbers and the patterns that they suggest.
