Mathieu Turi | Through the Shattered Lens

The 2020 French film, Meandre, opens with a woman named Lisa (Gaia Weiss) lying in the middle of the road, as if specifically begging someone to drive up and run her over.

When a man named Adam (Peter Franzen) approaches in his car, Lisa makes a last minute decision to get out of the car’s way. Adam stops the car and offers Lisa a lift to wherever she wants to go. Lisa accepts his offer and, as they drive through the night, Lisa reveals that today would have been the ninth birthday of her daughter, Nina. Adam, who has a cross tattooed on his wrist, appears to be sympathetic. However, then a report comes over the radio about a serial killer who is murdering hitchhikers and who has a cross tattooed on his wrist. Realizing that Lisa now knows that he’s a murderer, Adam slams down on the brakes and throws Lisa against the dashboard, knocking her out.

When Lisa wakes up …. well, Adam is nowhere to be seen. In fact, neither is the car. Now wearing a white, skin-tight uniform, Lisa is in a small room. She has a device on her wrist. She has no idea where she is or how she got there. She appears to be a prisoner but she doesn’t know why or who is holding her in captivity. Suddenly, a door slides open, revealing a narrow tunnel.

Lisa spends the majority of the movie crawling from one location to another. It’s never made quite clear just where exactly she is but it’s a place that’s full of tunnels, bobby traps, and the occasional rotting corpse. Whenever the device on her wrist starts to beep, the viewer knows that something bad is about to happen to Lisa and she’s going to have to either avoid fire or sharp blades or being crushed as the walls of the tunnel suddenly come together. Eventually, she also has to deal with a bizarre creature that chases her through the tunnels. Through it all, she thinks that she can hear the voice of her daughter….

For me, Meandre got off to a good start by featuring a main character named Lisa. Seriously, with a movie like this, it’s very important to be able to relate to the main character and, as soon as I found out that she shared my first name, I was totally on Lisa’s side. That said, Gaia Weiss gives such a strong performance that even people who are not named Lisa will be rooting for the character. The viewer sincerely wants Lisa to not only survive the traps but also discover why and where she is being held prisoner. Meanwhile, Peter Franzen gives an appropriately intimidating performance as Adam (who does make a return appearance to the film after the incident in the car), alternating between being friendly and murderous.

I was not a huge fan of the film’s ending, which felt a bit too obscure and new agey for its own good. But, ending aside, Meandre is an effective and claustrophobic horror film, featuring an excellent lead performance from Gaia Weiss.

The world is ending and you’re stuck in the desert. The vehicle you were driving has flipped over. You’ve got a severely broken leg and can’t move. The few remaining humans in the city have informed you that a rescue party will not be sent out until the sun rises. And you’ve got a deformed creature circling your crashed van, trying to find a way to enter. You have to figure out how to survive the night while being hunted by some sort of mutant and you also have to mentally work out your relationship issues while doing so.

(It may sound like a nightmare but if you ever break up with someone while on a road trip through South Texas and then you have to ask that person to give you a ride home, it can be a reality. Not that I’m speaking for personal experience, of course….)

That’s the situation in which Juliet (Brittany Ashworth) finds herself in the 2017 French film, Hostile. While Juliet tries to survive the night, she flashes back to the life and the world she used to know. She remembers how she was once a nearly illiterate drug addict who met and fell in love with an art gallery owner named Jack (Grégory Fitoussi). After discussing the paintings of Francis Bacon and the role of fate in everyone’s life, Jack took it on himself to lock Juliet in an apartment until she overcame her addiction. Now, that’s not something that most professionals would necessarily recommend trying, especially when the addict and the apartment owner barely know one another. In fact, I felt it was a bit presumptuous on Jack’s part. Who is Jack to decide that he’s going to be the one to save Juliet’s life? Jack may think that his intentions are good but there’s something a bit too self-righteous and controlling about Jack, even if he is trying to keep someone from self-destructing. He’s every preachy Intervention producer come to life. He’s someone who most viewers will feel a bit of ambiguity about.

The audience might not be totally comfortable with what Jack does but, for Juliet and Jack, it all works out and they fall in love. Juliet remembers the good times with Jack and she also remembers how their relationship eventually fell apart and how the world itself eventually started to end, almost as if their relationship issues were a bit of a metaphor for the fragility of society. Meanwhile, the creature outside the van continues to try to find its way inside.

Hostile is a claustrophobic and atmospheric end-of-the-world thriller from director Mathieu Turi. The inside of that van is a properly ominous location and it’s impossible not to sympathize with Juliet as she struggles to figures out how to survive the night. The film’s deliberate pace takes some getting used to and the final twist requires a certain suspension of disbelief but both Ashworth and Fitoussi are well-cast as Juliet and Jack. In the end, the film is a moody and interesting look at the end of the world, albeit one that is marred by the heavy-handedness of its script.