Welcome to the Loony Labyrinth

Film: Dave Made a Maze
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

You have to love it when someone comes up with a completely bonkers premise for a story and then pulls it off about as well as it could be done. Dave Made a Maze is a film that shouldn’t work. It’s marginally a horror movie, although the violence is clearly cartoonish and the blood is literally replaced with yarn and glitter. It’s a comedy because there is a lot of humor here, but it’s not really a horror comedy. The closest genre that it fits in is magical realism. We have characters who live in the real world but have an experience that cannot really be explained as anything other than magic. It’s just a hell of a lot weirder than the more standard magical realism films like Field of Dreams, Life of Pi, or Midnight in Paris.

Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani) comes home from a weekend to discover that her artist boyfriend Dave (Nick Thune) has built a small maze out of cardboard in the middle of their living room. Dave has a history of not completing projects, and the maze that he has created for him feels like a genuine breakthrough. The problem is, as he tells Annie, that he hasn’t finished the maze and he’s lost inside it. This seems patently ridiculous, as the maze appear to be about 20 square feet of cardboard boxes. When Annie tells him to just come out, he refuses to destroy the work, and also tells her that he’s lost inside the maze and can’t get out. Adding to the confusion, when Annie shakes the cardboard exterior of the maze, she can hear machinery and more rattling inside.

Annie’s response is to call in some friends, perhaps to see if something is really wrong, but mostly to deal with what clearly looks like a complete mental and emotional breakdown from Dave. Soon enough, there are friends, a homeless man, a film crew, and a pair of Flemish tourists. Filmmaker Harry (James Urbaniak) starts to interview the people in the room about what is happening. Eventually, the people in the apartment decide to go into the maze to rescue Dave, assuming that he’ll just be right inside.

Ah, but the maze is a great deal like the T.A.R.D.I.S.—much larger on the inside than on the outside. It’s a legitimate maze created from cardboard—far more cardboard than it looks like on the outside. It also contains a series of traps and booby traps. These start out mildly painful (one of the characters gets punched in the groin), but eventually become far more deadly. However, because the maze is something that exists in a strange sort of fantasy world, when people are killed by the traps in the maze, their blood appears as glitter and yarn. When Greg (Tim Nordwind, who is also the bass player from the band OK Go) hits a boobytrap trigger, he is struck by punji stakes that are actually paper towel tubes…but they still kill him.

Worse, because this is a labyrinth, it has created its own minotaur, who is now hunting everyone inside. So, now Dave, Annie, his surviving friends, and the film crew need to figure out why the maze is expanding, how to get out, and how to avoid the monster hunting them.

The strength of Dave Made a Maze is that it completely buys into its premise. Everything in the labyrinth (or almost everything) is made out of cardboard, including all of the traps and the gears that run them. Reality shifts from moment to moment as well. At one point, everyone turns into puppets made from paper bags, and turn black-and-white at one point—there’s a sort of cartoon logic at work here, but it does remain consistent through the film. Once a rule is established, the film sticks with the rule.

Additionally, the cast buys into this completely. Our film crew is dedicated to making a documentary about the maze, asking questions, interviewing the other people, trying to get second shots to make sure that they had the shots they needed and oddly ignoring the fact that they are constantly in mortal danger.

Dave Made a Maze is ridiculous and nonsense, but it strangely works. It’s surprisingly charming and endearing, and much of it works because Dave is completely understandable. He’s a gifted loser, someone who hasn’t figured out how to express himself. He’s constantly in second gear, and while the maze is clearly dangerous and out of control, it’s his maze, and he’s going to finish it regardless of the cost.

I genuinely don’t know why this works, but it does. And, it runs about 81 minutes including credits—which is the right length. Another 10 minutes of cardboard scenery would be too much.

Why to watch Dave Made a Maze: It’s one of the most creative and adventurous films you will ever see.
Why not to watch: It’s pretty weird.