Meander 2019

A woman lies in the middle of the road, and as a car nears she rolls aside just in time. The driver offers a ride, and what begins as a simple meeting quickly twists into something ominous: the two introduce themselves as Lisa and Adam, and Lisa notices a distinctive cross tattoo on Adam’s hand. She reveals that her daughter, Nina, would have turned nine that day, a detail that weights every word she speaks. A radio report interrupts their chat, describing a violent killer who bears that same cross tattoo on his right hand, sending a chill through Lisa as Adam suddenly stomps on the brakes and slams into danger, throwing Lisa forward.

She wakes in a sterile, unfamiliar chamber bathed in odd lights, a strange device strapped to her wrist pulsing with a yellow glow. A door slides open to reveal a narrow, claustrophobic tunnel, and Lisa crawls inside as the door seals behind her. The wrist device bleeps an alarm and a countdown flickers—an ominous 11 minutes—and her trial by passage begins.

The journey is a harrowing gauntlet. She squeezes through an ultra-narrow crevice, scales a platform that rises with a menacing creak toward the ceiling, and confronts a rotting body that falls apart as she moves past it. At one point the tunnel ahead closes off, the device glows red, and the countdown jumps to 60 as the walls heat with tubes of fire. A hidden section opens behind her, a wall splits, and flame floods the tunnel that she must outrun. She battles forward through a flood of water, then inches along a pit of acid with only slim ledges to cling to, all while a voice—someone calling out—haunts the corridor.

In a moment of peril, a man’s presence becomes menacingly real. The barriers rise, and a thin, scorching space opens between two locked segments. A burned, anxious figure—clearly a man who has spent years inside this trap—emerges from the murk with a hair and beard grown wild. The two push and pull, and when the barriers finally lift the two sprint toward safety. Lisa wins the struggle and flings the man into the tunnel ahead; the glass barrier slices off the man’s arm, revealing the cross tattoo as it burns, and the danger concludes with Adam burned alive as the tunnel fills with flame. Lisa collapses, exhausted and terrified.

When she regains consciousness, a skull-mounted, biomechanical tentacle slides down from the ceiling and begins to heal her. It attaches to her suit and she experiences a flashback—Adam stabbing her, the car crash, and a strange light in the sky. Grasping Adam’s severed arm, she notes three markings on the wrist device area: a diamond, a cross, and a diamond. Then a spinning blade materializes before her, forcing a desperate backward escape into a higher tunnel.

From above, a new passage opens and a bizarre creature—likely the burned Adam reanimated—slithers into the tunnel. It stalks her, and she must slip through a narrow gap the creature cannot fit. She moves onward to a fork where two tunnels split and reads the markings anew. Remembering the tattoo code, she selects the left path, and the sound of Nina’s voice echoes through a bright white chamber that displays images from her life: baby, family moments, and the parents she once knew.

The pursuing creature erupts into the room, descending with the burning glow of the tunnels behind it. It chases Lisa through another tunnel, this one lined with razor-thin wires. With courage and pain, she pushes forward, the wires slicing and tearing at her as the exit looms. A final flame-filled space opens and the safe area appears, but a cruel twist of fate sees her thrust back into the tunnel as the creature is corralled into the safe space.

Her next act is one of sheer resolve. Lisa uses the wrist markings to navigate a new course, and the compassion of survival drives her onward. She encounters a womb-like door—biological walls breathing with life—behind which strange, alien forms move in the distance. She squeezes through, finds another similar chamber, and retrieves her device just as an alarm sounds, waking the creature that had stalked her. The pursuit resumes through fire-tubed corridors until, again, Lisa forces the creature into a confinement that collapses under the weight of the tunnel, crushing its head.

Now comes a moment of quiet clarity. Guided by the symbols on her wrist, she advances until she spots Nina playing with a ball. The daughter is not real, a fragment of the trial, and Lisa understands she must choose another route. Nina offers a poignant farewell, touching her mother and whispering a line that echoes through the chamber: the daughter’s encouragement, “Live.” The encounter is brief but transformative, a reminder that love persists beyond illusion.

Armed with new purpose, Lisa enters a final, deadly corridor where three blades descend in sequences—every 4 seconds, then every 3, then every 2. She pushes through the gauntlet and reaches the exit, only to discover that what lies beyond is not sky but a screen showing a blue horizon. Flames flood the tunnel again, and hope seems to fade as the ceiling opens. Yet she ascends, rising into a brilliant light and finding herself outside on a rock beneath a clear blue sky. Her foot has healed, and Nina appears once more, radiant and gentle.

Lisa asks a simple question about death, and Nina’s reply reshapes the reality they inhabit: her body may have died many times, but she is safe now. Lisa asks what she is meant to do next, and this time the answer is unequivocal: Live. The film closes with a wide, lingering shot of an alien, breathtaking landscape, a stark, hopeful vista that invites the pair to begin anew, together, in a world that seems almost otherworldly in its beauty.