[Film Review] Meander (2020)

Meander had me at “claustrophobic death traps.” The poster and synopsis for the film promised horror reminiscent of Cube-meets-Saw, with a woman crawling through a tunnel trying to escape whatever elaborate bodily harm lies waiting for her if she doesn’t move quickly enough. Much like its heroine, though, Meander takes a few sharp left turns, subverting audience expectations and telling a much different story than the one I expected. While those turns don’t necessarily stand up to narrative scrutiny, what Meander lacks in rigorous plot logic, it makes up for in superb tension and emotional resonance. 

We meet Lisa (Gaia Weiss) as she lies in the middle of the road. She gets out of the way of an approaching car, somewhat reluctantly, and accepts a ride from the driver. Adam (Peter Franzén) is a little too curious about her life, and Lisa’s growing suspicions about the overly eager driver appear to be confirmed when they get into a car accident and she wakes up inside a small metal compartment. As she takes in her Tron-esque jumpsuit and the glowing cuff attached to her wrist, a hatch opens and a countdown begins on the cuff. Lisa discovers that she is in a vast labyrinth filled with grisly traps that will maim, roast, or drown her if she doesn’t get to the next safe zone and beat the clock ticking away on her wrist. 

Meander spends most of its runtime focused on Lisa crawling through a metal cylinder, but writer-director Mathieu Turi makes the film a suspenseful thrill ride that will have viewers cringing and yelling at the screen more than once. Weiss carries the film admirably, giving Lisa intelligence and pathos as she navigates the physical and psychological tests inside the mysterious tunnels. Turi adds visual flair to several scenes, including a striking shot of Lisa crawling in profile along a metallic path sparsely lit by primary-colored lights. In one of the moments that best exemplifies Turi’s treatment of horror tropes, he turns a popular modern horror shot into a vertiginous nightmare that makes the viewer feel Lisa’s claustrophobia just as much as she does. As she crawls through a particularly tight spot in the maze, the camera inverts and shows her inching through the tunnel upside down. The camera movement is so common in the genre nowadays that it is nearly cliché, but due to the tight space and the nature of her movement, it lends the scene a horrifying disorientation that placed me right in the tunnel with Lisa and had my head spinning. 

The film isn’t subtle about its themes, but it is still affecting in its exploration of them. We learn early on that Lisa lost her 9-year-old daughter and that she was lying in the road because she wants to see her again. She tells Adam when he picks her up that she is lost; between this overt vocalization of her character’s psyche and the painful maze she has to navigate throughout the majority of the film, it’s not difficult to see Turi’s metaphor for grief. Losing a loved one leaves you unmoored, trapped, and surrounded by pain no matter which way you move. Going backward into memory reminds you of what you no longer have; going forward into thoughts of a future without the person you lost highlights the gaping hole that will haunt you for the rest of your life. Crawling through barbed wire as it snags against her skin, Lisa experiences the excruciating pain of grief as a physical sensation, learning as she goes how to accept the pain and keep moving forward. 

Meander raises a lot of questions and may require a higher suspension of disbelief than some viewers are willing to give. However, for those open to it, the film’s twists will be a pleasure to uncover. The tense horror, emotional drama, and intriguing sci-fi elements work together — not perfectly, but well enough — to create an ambitious and emotionally resonant thriller that elevates Meander beyond a mere retread of its obvious influences. With Weiss’s strong lead performance and some compelling visuals, Meander is a suspenseful and surprising film that speaks to the universal pain of loss.

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