Macabre…ish Horror Review: Meander
Meander, 2020/ 90 min.
A car approaches a suicidal woman, Lisa (Gaia Weiss), lying in the road, she suddenly gets up and the driver offers her a ride. After talking for a while, on the radio the public is warned about a killer on the loose. He is described as having a cross on his hand, not unlike the cross on the driver’s hand. His name is Adam (Peter Franzén), by the way.
Adam suddenly swerves the car, knocking Lisa out and she wakes up somewhere strange, barefoot, wearing different clothes and with a light source and timer, counting down, around her wrist. She seems to be trapped in some kind of maze like crawl space. Hatches open and close to facilitate her movement. Once she passes through a hatch, there’s no turning back.
Some of the sections are barely big enough to crawl through. There are different levels and some move, the walls closing in on themselves. Some have lights shining through the grating.
And sometimes, there’s another victim of kidnap, a corpse, rotted away and little more than bones, it’s own wrist light still luminescing. In fact, Lisa will encounter many more and will find out for herself, what happened to them.
She’s being corralled through different levels of increasing difficulty through this labyrinthine tunnels. Sometimes it’s a horizontal crawl, sometimes a vertical climb, sometimes she’ll have to swim to the next stage. With every success, the time on her wrist begins to count down again from 10:00.
And then Lisa here’s a man yelling for help but don’t worry, there are plenty of traps and challenges between her and that voice. Which itself could be a trap. But everything about this place, by it’s very nature, is a trap.
Afterward, something really strange happens, some sort of bio nurse bot closes her wound and connects to a port on her abdomen.
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Flash: For a few minutes, Lisa is back in the car with Adam, fighting for her life as he is viciously stabbing her with a knife.
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Back in the maze she survives being ground up just before a monster steps down behind her. She crawl-runs for it. And at some point seems to crawl into a few, what can only be described as, anuses. Sphincter like openings on either side of the walls of a womb like structure.
It’s not long before the psychological torture of this place ramps up and has Lisa questioning her reality. But then something gives her hope.
This is a French production (Méandre) made by Mathieu Turi, it is in French and English. This is paced well, there is some blood and gore. The effects and cinematography are really good. This was sometimes tough to watch. If you liked The Cube, you might like this.