Meander (2021)

"CUBE with tubes!"

It's difficult to say much else about MEANDER, a French science fiction film that's getting a digital release from Altitude and kind of emulates Vincenzo Natali's excellent 1997 puzzle picture, but let's try.

We open with Lisa (Gaia Weiss) lying on a road beneath a flyover. She's picked up by Adam (Peter Franzen, probably best known to HMC readers as King Harald Finehair from Amazon's TV series VIKINGS). After a bit of chit chat to provide a smidgeon of characterisation Adam hits the brakes and then Lisa wakes up inside a cramped space.

She's barefoot and dressed in some kind of skintight uniform (one wonders if the original idea was to have her naked for the entire film - in a reductive vulnerable kind of way rather than exploitative). She has a timer round her wrist and soon a door opens, allowing her into a metal tube. Thus begins her journey through a series of traps which start off physical (heat, water, acid) but become psychological as well. But who is doing this and why?

MEANDER keeps you guessing up until almost the very end of the film when we reach a denouement that will be most satisfying to fans of 1970s-style art-house SF, so don't expect a Jigsaw-type character to turn up and explain it all. It's well-directed and Weiss carries a film requiring very little dialogue for much of its runtime very well indeed. It's actually nice to see this kind of SF on our screens again and MEANDER is a little low-budget EuroSF gem.

MEANDER is out on digital from Altitude on Monday 4th October 2021