*WITHOUT SPOILERS*
Storyline:
A young woman wakes up in a tube filled with death traps. In order not to die, she will have to constantly move forward..
Two years after his post-apocalyptic romance, the young filmmaker Mathieu Turi comes back with a second feature film: Meander. The one who started as an assistant director with the greatest Hollywood directors (Tarantino, Ritchie, Eastwood…) delivers here a visceral and intense claustrophobic behind-closed-doors.
If Hostile already broke the codes of the genre to take the spectator by surprise, Meander is in the same line. A watchword: surprise. And you will be!
Meander, a true sensory experience
Meander is above all an experience.
A physical experience but also a sensory one.
Mathieu Turi has built his film as an ultra-immersive ordeal for the spectator. Indeed, it is not only the heroine who is plunged into the heart of a path full of traps, suffers. We also suffer.
Physically, Meander is grueling.
Emotionally, Meander is harrowing.
We don’t watch Meander, we live it. Intensely. This is the success of Mathieu Turi’s film.
Nevertheless, if the images are strong, the concept breathtaking, the work on the sound is equally spectacular. The musical compositions, the sound mixing and the sound effects, also lead us to an auditory suffering, horrific and hellish, which brilliantly translates the nightmarish atmosphere of Meander. Without this work, the immersion would not have this so particular flavor, it would not be complete. Here, we are immersed, more caught in this heavy and oppressive atmosphere.
Meander was designed for the cinema.
At a time when Covid-19 is shaking up certainties about the place of cinemas in this uncertain future, and when streaming platforms decide to release their productions simultaneously in theaters and in our living rooms, films like Meander remind us of the importance of these places. Because Meander will not have the same emotional impact, not the same visual intensity, when you are in the cinema or when you watch the film on your television, however good it is.
Once again, everything has been designed for the cinema. This can be felt through the countless qualities of writing and music composed by men and women of great talent.
Fight & break free
Terrifying, Meander also seduces by the symbolic scope of its message, its moral and its cliffhanger as surprising as unexpected. Mathieu Turi reverses the codes of the genre, and offers a metaphysical finale with powerful philosophical reflections.
Meander is no longer the little French genre film with American ambitions, but follows its own path, diametrically opposed to all these psychological thrillers and low-end confinement, and presents itself as a profound, intelligent work with a unique concept.
Conclusion
In only two feature films, Mathieu Turi has managed to impose his style and seduce. All in brutality but in subtlety, the filmmaker takes us in his new behind-closed-doors, in a labyrinthine metaphor, where it is difficult to come out unscathed.
A new experience, Meander is the antithesis of the boring and insipid confinement film. With an identity of its own, the feature film from Alba Films will perhaps open the way to unique ideas and become a reference for the genre…