The imagery and setup for Meander invoke instant comparisons to Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. Both center on characters that awake in a bizarre sci-fi environment rigged with deadly traps, unaware of how they got there. But Meander takes an even more straightforward approach, following one protagonist on her harrowing fight for survival. It’s a bit too simple narratively, but it succeeds as experiential horror that brings intense, claustrophobic suspense.
Lisa (Gaia Weiss) lies in the middle of the road, alone, until a driver, Adam (Peter Franzen), passes by and offers her a ride. Alarm bells should trigger, but Lisa’s preoccupied with guilt and sorrow over the loss of her daughter. Then the radio announces news of a murder suspect at large, with a description that matches Adam. He slams on the brakes, and Lisa’s head collides with the dashboard. When she comes to, she’s no longer on the road but trapped in a high-tech box with a timer strapped to her wrist. The moment she finds her way out of the box, the true challenge begins; Lisa must navigate her way through a tunnel system designed to kill her at every turn.
Meander is almost entirely a one-woman show, with Lisa bellycrawling along the compact confines of the tunnel. Writer/Director Mathieu Turi finds innovative ways to create tension in a threadbare story that spends almost all of its runtime with a single character. Much of that tension comes from the emphasis on time. Lisa spends much of the early sequences learning the dangers of the tunnels and how it correlates to her timer. When it counts down, bad things happen, prompting Lisa to think fast or suffer dire consequences.
The production design goes far in making the tunnel system feel more expansive, and it doubles as the only worldbuilding offered. It makes creative and innovative use of minimal space. Turi injects some nightmarish imagery, both in the form of an antagonist and an aid to Lisa’s quest. The filmmaker also brings the pain, putting his character the wringer. However, the true star belongs to the sound design, which gives a visceral, tangible quality to everything Lisa encounters.
Turi doesn’t bother to fill in any blanks or handhold when it comes to answers or explanations. Logic quickly collapses under scrutiny, and details that should seem important don’t matter much at all by the end. Instead, Turi seems more interested in using Lisa’s journey as a loose allegory for grief. It’s effective as an experience but less so as a narrative whole. That also means that Lisa’s more internal arc makes for a lackluster ending, especially compared to everything she previously endured.
Weiss more than capably carries the movie. She brings Lisa’s emotional arc to the surface while selling the hell out of her physical endurance test. Weiss toggles quickly between melancholic vulnerability and feral fighter. She handles the horror well, too, contributing to more than one cringe-worthy moment.
Turi’s latest stretches a simple concept out to a feature-length with mixed results. It’s well-crafted on a visual and aural level, and it brings thrilling moments of claustrophobic dread and pain-fueled horror. Those moments and the lead performance sustain the entire viewing experience, making for stylish, fun horror that becomes too restricted by its surface-level storytelling in the end.
Meander releases in limited theaters and on VOD platforms July 9, 2021.
