Meander (2020)

directed by Mathieu Turi

France

91 minutes

3.5 stars out of 5

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There's something inherently sinister and disgusting about being trapped in a pipe compared to, say, a cage, or a small room even if it's purpose-built for torturing you. Pipes aren't generally meant to be seen; they ferry liquids (often waste or other noxious substances) from place to place and don't get maintained as frequently as they should. The thought of being stuck in a pipe is more upsetting to me than being stuck anywhere else. I don't know if Meander was directly inspired by Saw or the more recent Oxygène, but it one-ups both films by adding in sci-fi and horror elements that make it vastly more interesting and unique than anything else in the "trapped in a place" subgenre, as well as forcing its main character into a system of pipes that is not only gross by virtue of being pipes but because of... more organic presences in it.

I do not want to compare this to Saw overmuch, or to Oxygène, because Meander is really a thing all of its own. In mentioning how much it improves on the model set out by previous similar films, I don't want to tie it back too much to those other films. But it really does do a lot of new, unique things. We're teased at the beginning credits with a snippet of a news broadcast about corpses showing up with horrific injuries and reports of strange lights in the sky, and from then on things are introduced that make us realize bit by bit that the pipeworks the main character is trapped in are the construction of something much different than we're used to. If anything, this is way more Cube than Saw. Hell, it's more "Hellraiser pain dimension ruled over by an incomprehensible being" than Saw. The big problem I have with the "trapped" niche of the torture-porn subgenre is that it feels like a slasher with steps taken out (I.E., the killer already found their victim/s and now has them captive to do whatever with them). Meander takes that concept and turns it on its head to give us something thoroughly more bizarre and, in the process, more satisfying.

There is also something personal about this and the way it deals with bodily transformation that I wanted to mention, because the director made another film called Hostile before this one that similarly does things with notions of alienness and transformation. The main character in Meander has heavy trauma in her past relating to the death of her young daughter, and this memory metaphorically as well as literally haunts her on her way through the pipes. Vestiges of human-ness surround her, but they're an idea of humanity as seen through the lens of something inhuman. From the recreation of her memories, served to her in curated snippets, to the actual appearance of her daughter - but of course not her real, living daughter, just a facsimile - to her pursuit through the pipes by something that, while broiled to a crisp and driven insane by hatred, is recognizably human if you look at it for long enough. All of these things speak of an edited humanity, a stretching of the boundary line between human and human-as-worn-like-a-hand-puppet. Weirdly, the film somehow manages to emphasize that there is still some form of kindness to be found here: One of the most benevolent and helpful presences is a rotting human jawbone attached to some kind of cybernetic arm. I should not have found it so cute the way it kept gently donking into the main character like a baby goat practicing headbutts. The uncanny is definitely a strong force at play in making Meander feel original and fresh.

But is it fun to watch? A lot of these trap movies can feel like they drag on at the beginning because generally there's a warm-up period where the protagonist is just pissed-off and groggy and doesn't know what's going on, and the challenges aren't too hard, but the protag's reactions are over-the-top because of course they've never been stuck in a Hate Tube™ before and don't know how bad it'll get. The situation in this case kind of takes care of that because, thanks to the hints at more extraterrestrial strangeness going on than meets the eye, it feels more like there's something to discover right from the very start. No characters here have much of a "wow" factor; the protagonist doesn't have many compelling traits, she's just a classic case of "wrong place, wrong time, now you're stuck in a weird tube that's trying to kill you". I think it's pretty boring that the only backstory she was given was that she has a dead child, because that's heavily overused by now (especially for women, who don't seem in fiction to ever get to have trauma except for that of having or not having children) but I don't feel like the main character's backstory was make-or-break in a scenario this bizarre.