Actually, it’s more of a labyrinth. How do I know the difference? I don’t, but based on the film, labyrinths have minotaurs. Yes, the maze Dave built attracted a minotaur, because of course it did.
Mocking big budget Hollyworld, Dave Made a Maze follows the adventures of a bored man making a cardboard fort in his living room. Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) comes home from a weekend away to discover her boyfriend took a refrigerator box and channeled his inner I.M. Pei while she was gone. Dave (Nick Thune, the poor man’s Adam Scott) is -unfortunately- stuck inside his creation. On the outside, the structure can’t possibly take up more than 25 square feet of living room, but on the inside, it’s, like the title says, a maze.
The maze is alive. And it’s angry.
Dave is lost in his maze. He’s been there for three days now. He can hear and communicate perfectly well as, you know, talking through cardboard, but cannot figure out how to find the entrance … Hey Dave, have you tried string? Bread crumbs? The left-hand trick? Dave implores Annie and friends not to come in. “It’s boobytrapped.” He also asks that they not collapse the cardboard, because then we won’t have a movie.
I know what you’re thinking. And you’re not wrong.
“Can a man really get ‘stuck’ in a cardboard house?”
“Have you tried simply lifting up the entire structure?”
“Why not just punch your way out? It’s cardboard?”
“How bad could cardboard boobytraps be anyway?”
These are questions for a more logical film. In the one before us, a man has built a cardboard labyrinth that he cannot escape. Just roll with it because the sets are wonderful and it’s pretty clear that
everybody who made this film had an absolute blast making it. There’s a room guarded by origami. There’s a cardboard exhaust system. There’s a room of forced perspective so clever I wanted to give the cinematographer a hug. And there is a deadly minotaur.
Bottom line, the film is cheap. So cheap. And the acting isn’t great. And the sets could have been made by high school kids in a weekend. But Dave Made a Maze is a fun, silly film. the only comparison is my mind is Everything, Everywhere All at Once, which is my favorite watch in years. Hence, it is not for me to decide how expensive a film should look, just that whatever you show entertains me. Mission accomplished.
There once was a bored boyfriend named Dave
Who engineered his own need to be brave
The Frankensteinian bloom
Now threatened his doom
And might result in one weird cardboard grave
Not Rated, 80 Minutes
Director: Bill Watterson (the Calvin & Hobbes guy? No way! Wait. Don’t get excited; while the writer/director here shares the same name as the famous cartoonist, it is not the same guy. Awwww)
Writer: Steven Sears, Bill Watterson
Genre: Low-budget fun
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Did you enjoy Everything Everywhere All at Once? This is clearly one of films that inspired it
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: The mirthless
