It becomes a screen thriller you mentally set aside, like a puzzle with insufficient challenges to ever be worth tackling again. You make that leap, and the threat of fire, acid, assault by fellow “inmates” and the like grow less interesting with every passing minute. “Meander” abandons the reality it serves up for something instantly graspable as surreal. But as the clues to her situation, the meaning of the “parable” at the heart of this torture chamber test and her “solutions” to the deadly dilemmas she’s presented with here play out, I found myself more curious than gripped by suspense, more impressed by the production design than invested in Lisa or by the “tests” she faces. Weiss is a somewhat compelling heroine/surrogate for the viewer. Beyond the solution to the puzzle, there’s minimalist design, high-tech “traps” and a “ticking clock” that isn’t explained or dwelled up, a wasted plot element in a movie sadly in need of more urgency. Writer-director Mathieu Turi’s settings point us to a fairly obvious solution and fairly early. It should also be pointed out that if an alternating knot has an alternating minimal meander diagram, all of its minimal diagrams need not be meander. She stumbles across a sizzled corpse, silently absorbs the idea that there’s alien tech that can fix her injuries so that she can proceed, and cheats death in its many forms. But a sliding door opens, a crawlway is revealed, and she exits, starting down this or that shaft, led along like a mouse being manipulated, facing barbed wire and pathways that narrow or open up, ceilings that close down on her like a trash compactor, doors that clang open and shut, threatening to lop off a limb. She’s in a dimly lit cubicle, barefoot, with no one answering her screams. The Range Rover driver who picks her up ( Peter Franzén) asks a lot of questions, says he’s a night watchman because “I don’t like people.” And then Lisa wakes up in a knee-and-elbow-padded sci-fi jumpsuit, with a wrist bracelet that serves as a light, a timer and we assume tracking device. She’s a waitress, lying on a remote side road, as if waiting for somebody to get her life over with. Gaia Weiss plays Lisa, a French expat whom we meet on the road - literally. Meanders are produced when water in the stream channel erodes the sediments of an outer bend of a streambank and deposits this and other sediment on subsequent. I found it indifferently interesting, not remotely as gripping and visceral as say “Buried” with Ryan Reynolds stuffed into a coffin, or even “Rupture,” with Noomi Rapace trying to scheme her way out of a kidnapping. This is what Jigsaw would have cooked up with Bezos money and Musk tech. Usually the energy accompanying flow water in a river decreases progressively from the upper course of the river to the lowest course of the river. If you let yourself get caught up in the logistics of how this maze was conceived, financed and built, and by whom, you’re kind of missing the point. The eroded material from the pool tends to settle here the shallow area that connects one meander to the next. “Meander” is a tense torture porn parable about a tormented soul further tormented and tortured when she’s kidnapped and held hostage in the most elaborate hamster-maze ever conceived.
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