Meander: A grief-stricken woman is trapped in a lethal maze in this ambiguous, allegorical thriller
By Thom Ernst
Rating: B-minus
Meander seems an unlikely title for a movie that primarily exists inside a gauntlet of deathly traps. The word lacks urgency, even though it does address the wandering aspect of going from tunnel to tunnel without a sense of destination.
But if the title understates the mortal challenge faced by its central character, Lisa - who wakes to find herself the prisoner of someone’s deadly escape room - it aptly describes a life jolted into aimlessness by the pain of grief and trauma.
Maybe she’s a-mazed. Gaia Weiss makes her way through some dangerous duct-work in Meander.
Meander, by director Mathieu Turi, uses the device of the escape room, or tunnel in this instance, as a way of negotiating the story of a woman’s perilous journey through a debilitating sadness.
It’s allegorical, no doubt. But it’s an allegory that makes excellent use of an incredibly intricate and claustrophobic set piece.
The film opens with an overview of an expanse of wilderness. The sun is setting, diffusing the scene from its natural colour and into a cool blue. A more focused look reveals a woman lying on the road. A car comes along. The driver offers the woman assistance. She refuses. But then, perhaps sensing how foolish it would be to leave herself stranded, she accepts the ride.
We learn the driver’s name is Adam (Peter Franzén). We learn the woman’s name is Lisa (Gaia Weiss). And in the short exchange between them, backstories are shared to a degree unlikely to occur between two people who just met (and seem naturally guarded). Their conversation snowballs into bad childhoods and recent traumas.
Slowly, Lisa comes to realize that the man she has accepted a ride from is homicidal. But Adam is merely a glitch in what becomes a terrifying ordeal of crawling through a succession of traps involving flames, acid, narrowing passageways, and rising water.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
After an attack by Adam, Lisa wakes in a confined tubular box resembling a portion of a ventilation system. She is outfitted in what appears to be a one-piece white lycra suit, highlighted with a cross-stitching of black straps. Locked onto her wrist is an oversized bracelet functioning both as a flashlight and as a stopwatch.
The premise is played out to exciting and often gripping effect. Lisa, suffering from the accidental death of her daughter (she blames herself, of course), is at first confused then disoriented. She soon discovers that survival demands she reach the next corridor before the countdown on the wristband stopwatch runs out. All the while, an outside presence seems intent on torturing and nurturing her to various degrees.
One can accept the illogical mechanisms needed to engineer such a heinous set of murderous contraptions as being merely a dramatic device - such as the ones seen in Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997) and, to a lesser degree, any of the SAW movies.
Harder to accept is the film’s refusal to relinquish any of the whys and hows behind Lisa’s entrapment. And it’s to this, the director’s guarded understanding of his vision, that the word meandering takes on added significance. Instead of supplying the audience with concrete answers, Turi seems happy to keep the audience trapped—meandering through—a maze of undetermined possibilities with no plausible way out of the narrative.
Meander is directed by Mathieu Turi and stars Gaia Weiss and Peter Franzén. Meander is available beginning July 9 on VOD and in select virtual cinemas.