![]() It’s well-crafted on a visual and aural level, and it brings thrilling moments of claustrophobic dread and pain-fueled horror. Turi’s latest stretches a simple concept out to a feature-length with mixed results. She handles the horror well, too, contributing to more than one cringe-worthy moment. Weiss toggles quickly between melancholic vulnerability and feral fighter. She brings Lisa’s emotional arc to the surface while selling the hell out of her physical endurance test. Weiss more than capably carries the movie. That also means that Lisa’s more internal arc makes for a lackluster ending, especially compared to everything she previously endured. It’s effective as an experience but less so as a narrative whole. Instead, Turi seems more interested in using Lisa’s journey as a loose allegory for grief. Logic quickly collapses under scrutiny, and details that should seem important don’t matter much at all by the end. Turi doesn’t bother to fill in any blanks or handhold when it comes to answers or explanations. However, the true star belongs to the sound design, which gives a visceral, tangible quality to everything Lisa encounters. The filmmaker also brings the pain, putting his character the wringer. Turi injects some nightmarish imagery, both in the form of an antagonist and an aid to Lisa’s quest. It makes creative and innovative use of minimal space. The production design goes far in making the tunnel system feel more expansive, and it doubles as the only worldbuilding offered. When it counts down, bad things happen, prompting Lisa to think fast or suffer dire consequences. Lisa spends much of the early sequences learning the dangers of the tunnels and how it correlates to her timer. Much of that tension comes from the emphasis on time. ![]() 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. Meander is almost entirely a one-woman show, with Lisa bellycrawling along the compact confines of the tunnel. 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. 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. He slams on the brakes, and Lisa’s head collides with the dashboard. Then the radio announces news of a murder suspect at large, with a description that matches Adam. Alarm bells should trigger, but Lisa’s preoccupied with guilt and sorrow over the loss of her daughter. Lisa ( Gaia Weiss ) lies in the middle of the road, alone, until a driver, Adam ( Peter Franzen ), passes by and offers her a ride. It’s a bit too simple narratively, but it succeeds as experiential horror that brings intense, claustrophobic suspense. But Meander takes an even more straightforward approach, following one protagonist on her harrowing fight for survival. Both center on characters that awake in a bizarre sci-fi environment rigged with deadly traps, unaware of how they got there. It does not store any personal data.The imagery and setup for Meander invoke instant comparisons to Vincenzo Natali’s Cube. The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance". This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary". The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional". The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics". These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.
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