Reviewed by Anne Wollenberg
Stars Santi Millán, Lluis Homar, Federico Luppi, Alejo Sauras,
Elena Ballesteros, Núria Badia, Víctor Benjumea,
Ariadna Cabrol, Helena Carrión, Cesc Cornet
Written by Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña
Certification UK 12A
Runtime 88 minutes
Directed by Luis Piedrahita & Rodrigo Sopeña
The low-budget Spanish thriller Fermat’s Room raises some nagging questions. Like the fact that four really, really intelligent people are more than happy to meet a stranger at a remote location, purely on the strength of an anonymous invitation. And, to top it off, they are willing to leave their mobile phones behind.
Then there’s the question of why someone would devise a plot to murder a group of mathematicians by locking them in a room, giving them a series of puzzles to solve and rigging the walls to close in a bit further each time they take more than 60 seconds to answer. And the person who did this definitely means business – they’ve used hydraulic presses. All of this may sound like it sits at an awkward halfway point between Saw and The Crystal Maze, but Fermat’s Room is in fact both engrossing and entertaining. While it’s based around a simple, if silly, premise – mathematicians are forced to complete puzzles to stay alive – and its twists are predictable, it manages not to become dull or laborious.
Writer/directors Luis Piedrahita and Rodrigo Sopeña seem to have made a wise decision not to alienate large chunks of the audience: the puzzles are a series of logic problems, not the complex theorems that mathematicians of this calibre would actually discuss if you shut them in a room together, rather than trying to solve the truth/lying door riddle that appeared in The Labyrinth. Films about maths aren’t exactly jostling for space in a crowded genre, and some dire ones – the likes of The Number 13 and The Oxford Murders, to name but two – give the rest a bad name. But then, while Fermat’s Room appears to be a film about maths and mathematicians, it’s more of a whodunnit, and a surprisingly watchable one at that.