Welcome back to Movie Recapped. Today I will show you a 2020 French sci-fi film, titled
Meander. Spoilers ahead! Watch out and take care. Lisa is lying flat in the middle of the road,
looking at the sky and crying silently. She hears a car approaching but she is only waiting for her
death. At the last moment, she gets up and gets out of the car’s way. The driver stops next to her
and offers her a ride. After all, they are in the middle of nowhere and the nearest gas station is
6-7 miles away. Lisa refuses at first but then notices that it has already started snowing.
She accepts the right and the driver opens the door for her. The mysterious driver, Adam, tries
to chit-chat with Lisa, asking about what she does for work, talking about his job and so on,
but Lisa is not very talkative. Lisa’s daughter, Nina, has unfortunately died and this would be her
birthday if she were alive. Adam asks if that’s why she was laying on the road. Lisa replies that
she doesn’t truly want to die but only wants to see her daughter again. After this, Adam turns
the radio on and the news broadcaster is talking about two murders that took place that morning.
The serial killer was believed to be a white male with a cross tattoo on his right hand.
Adam turns the volume down and Lisa notices that he also bears a cross tattoo.
Lisa is startled but is not able to say anything before Adam brings the car to a sudden halt,
causing Lisa to hit her head. Lisa wakes up in a narrow room with steel walls and hardly
any lights. She is now dressed in a bodysuit and a bulky, glowing bracelet is weighing her hand down.
Her first reaction is to scream for help and bang on the walls and the openings to try and escape,
but it is to no avail. She can hear strange, mechanical noises coming from outside the room.
Soon, a circular door slides open and Lisa wiggles into it before it closes again behind her.
She finds herself even more trapped in this narrow tunnel. Suddenly, her glowing bracelet
starts ticking backwards from 11 minutes. Lisa has no idea what this means but reckons it cannot be
for anything good. She has no other choice but to move forward towards the end of the tunnel,
where a light can be seen, with only her bracelet lighting the space. Unexpectedly,
a door slides closed ahead and the light at the end of the tunnel is now completely gone.
She fights a small opening to her left and she has to make herself paper-thin and squeeze through it
to find the next tunnel. There, the light shines in yellow and red and not just blue as in the
room she had woken up in. She enters the tunnel only to discover that the floor moves upward,
leaving less and less space for her. Lisa hurries to the end of the tunnel where she
is able to escape right on time before her feet can be crushed. Lisa takes a moment to
catch her breath but the clock on her wristband is still ticking, urging her to move forward.
Ahead, she finds a stinking corpse that is blocking her way. She coughs and gags when
the foul smell hits her nostrils but she has to move the decomposing body to get ahead. As she
moves forward, a door with three openings falls from the ceiling and her bracelet turns red,
warning her that there is only one minute left – for what, she doesn’t yet know. As she is trying
to figure out how to open the door, dozens of burning tubes appear from the walls. Suddenly,
a wall is slides open behind her, so Lisa hurries into the hollow where a glass door closes her in.
When the seconds on the clock run out, Lisa watches in horror as the corridor from where she
has just escaped is consumed by flames. When the fire has burned out and the burning tubes slide
back into the wall one by one, the glass door sets Lisa free. She is pushed back into the corridor,
where the walls narrow so much that she is almost crushed to her death before they stop moving.
Not believing that she is saved from certain death, Lisa breaks into tears, but soon she
notices that the clock has been again rewound to 11 minutes. She pushes herself forward until her
fingers touch something cold. She realizes she has reached a pool of water where she can get a sip to
satisfy her thirst. Lisa takes a deep breath and drives in and by lighting her way forward, she
swims to the next opening. This time, she finds a wider tunnel but just as she thinks she is safe,
a torrent of water floods the room. The water has led another corpse to Lisa’s feet. Now Lisa has
to swim through this filthy water to escape. As Lisa, tired and soaked, is laying down to catch
her breath, she hears a man’s voice shouting for help and she picks up her pace at once.
The tunnel ahead seems to be plain at first but soon, two panels slide open on the flood,
revealing a pool of some green, fuming liquid. Lisa rips out a piece of cloth from her bodysuit
to test the liquid and when she dips the cloth in it, she sees realizes that it is some sort of
acid that burns anything it will come to contact with. She supports herself on either side of the
tunnel and carefully moves forward and just as she thinks she has successfully evaded this obstacle
as well, her knee slides into the acid. Lisa screams in pain as the acid burns her skin
off and she can hardly move when she takes it out of the liquid, but she keeps hearing the
man’s voice begging for help. Lisa gets in the tunnel below, where the voice is coming from.
Two of the doors with the three openings are separating her from the other person.
The man has completely broken down in tears and it seems that he has been there for much longer than
Lisa. He tells her that ‘they’ are going to kill her but just before he can answer who ‘they’ is,
both bracelets glow red. The burning tubes once again slide out of the wall and this time,
the safe space is between Lisa and the man. The man warns her that she is going to die now,
meaning that he will fight to claim the safe space, so as soon as their doors open,
Lisa hurriedly and decisively moves forward. She is not afraid to kick and push the man to save
herself and although sometimes his strength seemed to be greater, in the end, she managed to trap his
hand useless until the glass door falls down and severs it. The man cries in agony and Lisa notices
that on his other hand, there is a cross tattoo, so she recognizes him as Adam. This whole time she
thought that he was the one who had abducted her. How could he be in the tunnels as well?
Just as she makes this realization, their clocks run out of time and the corridor is
taken over by flames once more, burning Adam. In her terror, Lisa covers her ears to escape his
screams but faints as her body cannot take it any longer. When she comes back into consciousness,
she sees Adam’s severed hand right next to her and she pushes it aside in disgust.
Soon she notices a hole in the ceiling that has a gel-like fluid coming out of it.
What seems like a human, decomposing head comes out of the hole. The steel helmet on the skull
heals the burn on her knee and a tube comes out of its mouth that feeds her. Slowly, the skull
starts evoking a bright light that throws Lisa back in her memories after Adam stopped the car.
She sees herself fighting against him, who is holding a knife and is trying to stab her.
When she manages to knock him out, she sees blood on her hands, meaning that the fight has
left wounds on her. Lisa turns her gaze to the sky where she can see the stars shining in the night.
However, one of them starts shining brighter and brighter until a light lands upon her.
She comes back from the memories and realizes that whatever has abducted her is not of this earth.
After this, the head returns to its hole and Lisa, along with Adam’s severed hand, is pushed to the
corridor once again. She decides to take a look at the hand for anything that might help her.
She finds that under the bracelet, Adam had three symbols marked on his skin; two circles with an X
between them. She doesn’t know what this means but as she is trying to interpret it, a bright
orange light turns on at the end of the corridor. At first, she thinks a fan is moving towards her
but she soon realizes that it is a mincer that is coming after her. She starts to move backwards
in the tunnel to find the whole where she came from and watches as Adam’s hand gets completely
swollen by the mincer. She manages to escape a split second before having her feet cut off.
Once in the tunnel, the clock starts counting backwards from 11 once more. Suddenly, a round
panel slides open above her. A hand lowers down and then the dark figure of a body but from the
growls and the snarls, Lisa realizes that this is not another person trapped in a tunnel but
rather some kind of monster. At first, she tries to keep her calm, as the monster doesn’t seem
very aggressive, but when she tries to slowly slide forward, she hears it growl warningly.
She makes the tiniest sound when she accidentally hits the wristband on the steel flooring and the
zombie immediately comes after her. Lisa quickly makes a right turn and then a left one and she
squeezes through two walls where the zombie gets trapped. Lisa continues her way forward because
her clock is ticking, and now she encounters a room with two identical openings. She examines the
tunnels and finds no differences in them, so she randomly decides to enter the left one. As soon
as she is in, she heard a girl’s voice singing and she recognizes the voice as her daughter Nina’s.
She follows the voice to discover that the tunnel leads to a white room and not yet another tube.
She touches one of the walls and the glass behind her starts showing her memories from her past,
memories she couldn’t possibly remember, like her being in a crib with her father laughing above her
but other memories she always wanted to relive as well, like her daughter Nina playing in the
playground. The wall also reveals to her how her daughter actually died, when she dropped her ball
out of the window and went after it. Lisa breaks into tears, blaming herself but when she sees the
zombie’s hands banging against the ceiling, she knows that there is no time to waste. She hops
on the tunnel ahead with the zombie right behind her but when she looks at the end of the tunnel,
she realizes that it leads to a bright sky. The only problem is that to get there,
she first has to get through thorny wires that stretch in various directions and as if this
weren’t enough, her clock warns her that there is only one minute left and as usual,
the burning tubes come out of the walls. Lisa has no choice but to move forward despite the immense
pain caused by the thorns tearing her skin. By the moment she has escaped the thorns, the time
is up and the tunnel lights up in flames but Lisa is saved when the floor opens up and swallows her.
Lisa comes back into consciousness in the room she first woke up and seeing that all her efforts have
gone to waste, she almost breaks down. A skull comes down to heal the wounds that are still
gouging blood but she stops it and asks it to kill her instead. However, just before a needle is
about to get inserted into her system, Lisa has a moment of epiphany. She remembers the symbols that
were marked under Adam’s wristband and realizes it is a clue for the two identical tunnels.
She suspects that she also has markings under her own wristband that show her which tunnel to take.
She lets the robot skull heal her and then reenters the tunnels.
This time, she knows exactly what to do and where to go. She passes through the tunnel
that attempts to crush her with incredible ease, hides from the fire, knowing where the opening is,
quickly swims to the next tunnel and reaches the acid pool she encountered before.
Here, she dips her hand in, just enough to burn the clock out and when it snaps out of her hand,
she sees that she was indeed right. On the inside of the wrist, there are two Xs and one circle and
this is how Lisa realizes that the tunnel she should follow the left tunnel and then the right
one. She follows the tunnel straight ahead without a detour and follows the path she thinks is right
according to the clues. Before she can get to the end, a zombie once again comes after her, so she
hurries. The next tunnel she encounters has no gravity, so she has no control over where falls.
Despite that, she escapes it much faster than the zombie. As soon as she is out of the tunnel,
her clock starts glowing purple instead of yellow. To distract the zombie, she throws the wristband
into a tunnel but enters another one. Now that the zombie is following the wrong tunnel, Lisa
has some time to think and realizes that she has actually followed the wrong tunnel and therefore
takes a right turn. The way leads her to a gross looking tunnel with an intestine-like membrane.
When she breaks the membrane, she finds herself in a room that looks like an internal organ.
She touches one of the walls and a three-fingered hand touches hers. An alien head presses against
the wall, trying to touch her and Lisa realizes that the creatures are actually very helpful
and playful. When she moves to the next room, she realizes that they have given the broken bracelet
back to her. The only problem is that the zombie has been caught in the exit to the tunnels and
when the wristband lights red with only one minute left, the zombie wakes up and comes after her.
Lisa goes back into the tunnels but the zombie catches her foot, so she has to hit it with the
wristband to set herself free. The burning tubes are already out in the tunnel and so is the safe
space that shuts her in the protect her. However, this time, the tunnel outside is not caught in
flames and Lisa soon realizes that this is not a triumph at all. The glass door opens again and the
safe space is pushing her back to the tunnel where she has to wrestle with the monster.
To kill the zombie once and for all, she presses her foot on its head and waits for the safe space
to give her a final, strong push so that the zombie’s head gets crushed. Glad that she has
escaped her fate once more, Lisa goes back into the organ room and back out the other exit.
At the end of the tunnel, she finds a room with two openings. The left one is wide and tall,
while the right one is just another tunnel. She knows she must pick the right one when a ball
comes out of the wide, left tunnel. The ball is the same one that Lisa had followed to her death.
Lisa watches in tears as Nina appears in front of her. She is so glad to see her girl again,
that when she tells her to forget about the time and follow her, she does so blindly. However,
Lisa knows that this is only an illusion, and although it pains her to lose her only chance
to see her daughter, she knows that she has to walk back and enter the right tube.
Before she follows the right path, she shares one last embrace with her daughter, who tells her that
she is proud of her. ‘All of us are proud of you’, she says, further confirming that this is just a
vision the aliens are showing her. When Lisa opens her eyes, Nina is gone. She must now continue to
the next tunnel, at the end of which, she can see the sky. However, before she manages to reach it,
she sees three doors falling from the ceiling. Lisa sets the wristband aside,
knowing that she must forget about time in order to get ahead. She counts that the first door falls
every four seconds, takes a leap of faith and quickly gets past it with one second to spare.
The second door falls every three seconds, so she manages to get past it in the nick of time.
The third door, however, falls every two seconds, making it impossible to get through.
But Lisa is too close to the sky to stop now. She pushes forward and almost passes safely but
screams in pain when half her foot gets completely cut off. Hardly able to move from the pain,
she tries to reach for the sky but realizes it was just a screen all along. She lays down in
pain and tears and tells the aliens that she has done everything they asked for.
She has gone through thick and thin for nothing yet the burning tubes slide out of the walls once
more. She waits to feel the burning of the flames but it never comes. Instead, a blue light shines
above her and Lisa feels herself levitating. When Lisa wakes up, all her wounds are healed,
she can hear birds chirping and she is in the outside world. A waterfall is flowing behind her
and as she admires it, Nina shows up beside her. Lisa asks her if she is dead and Nina answers that
her body died several times but she is now safe. She asks her daughter what she has to do now. Nina
only answers that she has to live, implying that she has to keep on going, leaving the past behind
her once and for all. Lisa can see two planets in the sky and she realizes that she might not
be on earth at all but instead, on the planet the aliens have brought her to live with her daughter.