Studio: Gravitas Ventures
Director: Mathieu Turi
Writer: Mathieu Turi
Producer: Eric Gendarme, Thomas Lubeau, Marc Olla, Jordan Sarralie, Julien Deris, David Gauquie, Sandra Karim
Stars: Gaia Weiss, Peter Franzen, Romane Libert
Review Score:
Summary:
A woman must survive a series of deadly traps after inexplicably waking up inside a mysterious passageway of connected tunnels.
Review:
Even though I’d already added it to my streaming queue, second thoughts spurred me to reconsider if I really wanted to watch “Meander.” I decided to fast-forward to a few random spots to see if I could get a quick sense of whether or not the movie might be for me.
7:25. 20:05. 33:15. 1:02:20. No matter where I pressed Pause, the screen froze on a shot of a woman struggling to slink through a narrow passageway. Sometimes she’d be seen from the front. Sometimes from behind. Sometimes from the side. Granted, that’s the premise. A woman inexplicably wakes up in a confined chamber and must navigate a series of trap-laden tunnels. I’m fascinated by thrillers that spring from simple concepts and it was those allusions to “Buried” and “Cube” that caught my eye in the first place. But this looked like a lot of redundant crawling. Did I really want to spend 90 minutes stuck inside a tube watching one woman wriggle around? That’s a question every viewer will have to answer in the affirmative to have any chance of surviving “Meander” with their attention spans intact until the end.
Someone else with second thoughts is Lisa. Distraught over the death of her nine-year-old daughter, Lisa lies in a remote road waiting for a passing car to run her over. Thinking better of it, Lisa stands up instead and is promptly picked up by Adam. A radio report interrupts small talk between these two strangers. There’s a killer on the loose who matches Adam’s description. Lisa eyes Adam with suspicion. Adam suddenly swerves.
That prologue takes place in our present. Somehow, what happens next appears to possibly take place in the distant future.
Lisa wakes up in a strange little room wearing a bizarre bracelet with a countdown timer. She has no idea where she is, who put her there, or why. When a porthole opens, Lisa begins making her way through a linear labyrinth of connected tunnels. Each time the clock locked around her wrist expires, a deadly trap suddenly springs that Lisa must survive.
The traps aren’t particularly clever. They’re a lot like timing-specific Super Mario Bros. obstacles that have to be avoided while prone. Collapsing walls come together to form a crusher. Fiery flames shoot down one passageway. An acid pit opens underneath another. Lisa doesn’t really have to rack her brain. The straightforward contraptions simply test her athleticism as she’s mostly challenged to see how quickly she can move.
It’s difficult for “Meander” to foster significant suspense during these physical feats since this is a one-woman show. If Lisa were to drown, burn to death, or get pancaked in an oversized compactor, the movie would instantly end, so there’s no reason for anyone to fearfully bite their nails as though she’s in any real danger of dying.
Pacing picks up at the halfway point when Lisa’s predicament takes on a sci-fi twist. Given the relatively routine way her story starts out, “Meander” unexpectedly introduces some “what the?” weirdness that catches Lisa and the audience off guard. Out from one ceiling comes a mutant skull wearing a cyborg implant capable of Star Trek medical tricks. Out from another ceiling emerges a feral creature in the charred husk of a human. Suddenly, we’re no longer passively observing Lisa figuratively tiptoeing from one pitfall to the next. Now there’s much more to the “what’s going on?” mystery for a viewer’s mind to actively puzzle over.
Those licks of horror sweeten the stale taste of “Meander’s” repetitively mundane moments. Not enough to make the movie a runaway winner, but enough to leave an imprint in your mind that isn’t made from Lisa’s oddball Olympic trials.
As feared, scenes of actress Gaia Weiss squeezing through cramped corridors make up a majority of the movie, and that’s a lot of “same old, same old” to wearily wade through. Director Mathieu Turi is still a sharp craftsman no matter what, and he effectively emulates claustrophobic feelings from the sounds of Lisa’s huffs and puffs colliding into each other as they bounce off of tight walls. But “Meander” puts people through their own trial of getting through a gripping 20-minute idea overstretched into a full-length feature whose finish line is a Choose-Your-Own-Interpretation ending certain to leave some viewers feeling letdown by the ambiguous explanation.
My advice? Skip to a few sections throughout the film to suss out if it’s a thriller that fits your fingers. I wasn’t sure, so I took the plunge anyway. Hopefully this review provides additional perspective so you can decide if this is a compact adventure worth traversing across or just another indie arroyo to step right over.
NOTE: The film’s French title is “Meander.”
Review Score: 55
At least the movie only runs 70 minutes, though I suppose that extra 10 technically disqualifies it from being a literal amateur hour.