“I don’t want to die. I just want to see my daughter again.”

Justin’s rating: Is it weird that Google offers a street view of this place?

Justin’s review: One of my favorite cult scifi flicks of the ’90s was Cube, a brilliantly minimalistic exploration of strangers trapped inside a series of shifting deadly cubes. There’s something compelling about tossing people into a modern dungeon and seeing if they can quest their way to the exit — or final boss. As long as it doesn’t descend into pure torture porn (i.e., Saw), I’m always on board to see what other directors can do with this premise.

In the French-made Meander, Lisa (Gaia Weiss) is a grieving former mother who’s picked up by a strange man who may well be a serial killer — or a victim himself. Before she knows it, she wakes up in a seemingly high-tech system of tubes while wearing a futuristic suit and sporting a glowing wristband.

Soon enough, she finds out that she’s a rat in a strange maze, with certain death closing around her and a literal timer always ticking down to the next bad thing that’s coming her way. The only chance Lisa has is to keep moving, keep moving through this maze while trying to figure out its rules. Stopping means certain death.

The will to survive and the mental fortitude to figure out the right sequence of actions and paths are all that’s going to get her out of each subsequent tunnel. There’s one that’ll crush you, one that’ll burn you, one that’ll drown you, and so on. Meanwhile, we as the audience are invited into her claustrophobic hell to imagine how we’d do in these deadly escape rooms with the gnarly remains of former contestants. Probably poorly.

Without spoiling it too much, Meander is far more than a cheap Saw knockoff with a Jigsaw dude tormenting a new catch. There’s a genuine mystery at play here, a mystery that Lisa must figure out if she’s to make it out of these tunnels alive. As it pushes past the halfway mark, this film takes a left turn into some interesting weirdness that hints at something far more science fictiony than a hopped-up escape room setting.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers reward our patience with oblique answers and veiled possibilities. I think we are due more than that as an audience, so I’m deducting some serious points as I would at any film that can’t figure out a clever ending to its setup and thus leaves far too much to the imagination. And if I’m monkeying with the scoreboard, let’s issue another deduction for not coming up with traps that are anywhere near as clever as Cube’s.

Meander is the first film since The Descent that made me feel viscerally anxious due to the tight confines and tricky maneuvers of our hero. It’s not an intellectually deep exercise, this film, but rather an emotional experience with a veneer of scifi trappings. Whoever or whatever designed this place had a whole lot of technology and resources on hand, but don’t expect to get a lot of clear answers. Just head into it and see if Lisa can do what you definitely could not: survive.

Intermission!

• Lying on the road in the wet cold doesn’t seem like a good idea.
• “I don’t like people.” “I know how you feel.”
• The timer on her wristband can’t be counting down to good news
• Fire tunnel looks cool
• All movie acid must be (a) green and (b) boiling
• Hey weird robot skull thing!
• Barbed wire makes for a fun crawling experience
• What’s under her bracelet