Last night’s exercise in divine strangeness on Netflix Disk: DAVE MADE A MAZE (2017), about a 30-year-old dude without much in the way of accomplishment who, when his girlfriend leaves him alone for a weekend, fills the living room with a cardboard maze made out of old boxes. The problem is: by the time she returns, he is trapped inside. The maze is much bigger inside than on the outside, is filled with deadly booby traps, and is patrolled by a minotaur.
A bunch of his skeptical friends, including three guys who think it’s a great idea to film a documentary, crawl in to rescue him.
What is great about this:
a) the production design inside the maze. It is all cardboard, but the practical effects are all eye-popping, and some of them are quite beautiful.
b) the movie fully embraces the absurdity of the premise. (One thing that happens, in particular, will set you to roaring.)
c) though it functions as a horror movie of sorts, as some of his friend succumb to the booby traps, the movie has absolutely nailed the problem of how to treat the inevitable gore without completely ruining the spell. To wit — and I give you this spoiler only to make sure the fear of gore won’t scare away the wusses among you — all bloody carnage is depicted with silly string and crepe paper, and that is treated as one of the strange magical effects of this realm they’re all trapped in. It works beautifully.
and d) the protagonist’s girlfriend, played by one Meera Rohit Kumbhani, has eyes that work profoundly well with astonished comic takes.
What doesn’t work:
Some of the broad characterizations go a little too far, and the movie strains, near the end, to fill its eighty minutes.
Still, a terrific demonstration of the kind of thing that can be done on a limited budget, if you’re clever enough.
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