Dave Made a Maze (2017)

In the absence of his somewhat long-suffering girlfriend Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), perpetually frustrated artist – if you actually do someone who never finishes an artistic project one - Dave (Nick Thune) decides to build a maze out of cardboard boxes in their apartment’s living room. When Annie returns, she is confused and a little annoyed not only by their new living room decoration but also by the fact that Dave’s unwilling to come out of the cardboard fort he has crawled into. Or rather, as he tells it, unable to come out, for he has gotten lost in it. The maze, which in truth is a labyrinth, apparently is, ahem, bigger on the inside.

Annie, drifting from annoyed to concerned to somewhat disturbed rather quickly, calls in Dave’s best friend Gordon (Adam Busch), but he’s not getting any further with Dave either. Eventually, a whole bunch of people – including asshat director Harry (James Urbaniak) and his two man documentary film crew (Frank Caeti and Scott Narver) – ends up in the apartment, until Annie eventually decides that enough is enough and ventures into the labyrinth herself, with most of the idiots/guests following. Turns out Dave has been telling the truth all along, so everyone gets lost in the cardboard labyrinth, some killed by the booby traps Dave has constructed (don’t ask) or hunted by the minotaur who haunts the place. Perhaps if Annie and Dave manage to reunite, they can get out together?

On paper, the whole set-up for Bill Watterson’s Dave Made a Maze sounded just a bit too precious to me, and certainly not the thing a that can carry a full-length movie. Encountering it as an actual artefact, I found myself delighted by the whole affair, and certainly neither bored nor annoyed even once through the whole of its running time.

Watterson and co-writer Steven Sears, it turns out, do have a rather fecund imagination about what can be done with a surreal cardboard box labyrinth, spilling out ideas en mass. These ideas are sometimes whimsical, sometimes strangely poetic, sometimes goofy, sometimes nerdy, sometimes plain strange, and sometimes even a little creepy, but they’re never boring or pointless, at the very least always causing the joy in me I feel when I encounter a good strange idea. Most of the time, they do quite a bit more, though, turning the film into one of the weirder relationship movies you’ll probably encounter in your life, talking about the complications of Dave’s difficult attempts at growing up, feelings of inadequacy, and how difficult love can be when one of the lovers is a guy like Dave. I’m avoiding using the word “manchild” here, because it’s invented by people who seem to want everyone to be their most conservative, joyless selves, making the life of a grown-up sound quite a bit more hellish than it has to be, and worse, not something movies about TARDIS-like cardboard mazes belong into. Our true protagonist is the more socially acceptably grown-up Annie anyway, taking on the very classic heroic role of rescuing her lover out of a labyrinth (parallels to Greek myth are certainly very consciously used here, because it’s just that sort of cardboard labyrinth).


But really, what I find most enjoyable about the film is its sheer number of little weird ideas, used in manners throw-away and not quite so throw-away, the playfulness with which it can and does use perspectives and camera angles in a cardboard world, the sheer peculiarity of things like the hypnotic vagina thingie, the silliness of its very special kind of fake blood, the at once creepy and hilarious cardboard doppelganger, or the pure inventive joy of turning the characters into little cardboard version of themselves for a while.