Wanted to find something maybe, I guess, traumatic to watch to help me feel something after the bad news I got earlier, and went trolling through Amzn Prime video's horror section and came across this French film, Méandre ("Meander" in English).
The premise reminded me a lot of Cube, which I'm a big fan of despite its schlocky quality, so I went into this expecting a similar experience and I wasn't disappointed. Actually, I was honestly kinda pleasantly surprised! I'd like to let it stand on its own, but I can't help comparing it to the aforementioned sci-fi horror classic.
Like Cube the protagonist is trapped in some strange sci-fi facility full of traps that seems purpose built to torture people, but unlike Cube, Méandre has a slight supernatural element to it. The facility in Cube is handwaved to be some incomprehensibly huge complex under the New Mexico desert or something, with some vague suggestions that it's research project gone to far or something, but the main character of Méandre is implied to have been abducted by some alien entity of unknown origin. While a major point of Cube was to put a bunch of awful people together and force them to work together to escape, Méandre exclusively follows the protagonist Lisa along her "hero's journey" of discovering her own limits and capabilities.
It was a lot less bleak than I was expecting. Kind of a hopeful take on the "random person faced with trials and traps" trope. A lot remains unexplained by the ending, but I still found it satisfying enough.
Aside from all that, the effects were decent, the set design is spartan but manages to be pretty sleek and stylish in spite of mostly taking place in identical, featureless metal ducts. Gaia Weiss's performance as Lisa was pretty solid—perfectly believable in the scenario, good thing because there are only two other actors in the film who only appear in a few limited scenes.
Overall, I give it 4 featureless metal ducts out of 5. Wasn't mindblowing but in retrospect I think it was pretty much exactly what I needed to see when I saw it.
