"Dave Made a Maze" on Amazon Prime
After a weekend away, Annie comes home to discover her boyfriend, Dave, has spent the time constructing a maze of corrugated cardboard in the middle of their apartment. It looks about the size of a camping tent but somehow Dave is stuck inside it. He pleads for help and warns that "it's bigger than it looks from the outside." So begins a funny, absurd and sometimes dark adventure as Annie leads a fellowship of Dave's slacker friends into his incomprehensible creation: a ramshackle labyrinth of corrugated cardboard, full of booby traps, transformative portals, grand caverns, flying origami birds and, of course, a minotaur. The maze itself is alive, and growing and Dave realizes the only way to escape it is to complete it.
The film is quirky and silly most of the time, but there are scenes where the filmmakers' high degree of set craftsmanship and unwavering commitment to a crazy story are astonishing. It will remind you of every makeshift fort you built as a kid and manages to evoke those fleeting moments of childhood when you actually believed you had to jump from the couch to the coffee table because for a split second the floor really, really, really was made of lava. It's a fun ride, mining laughs from unexpected places and perfectly-timed, deadpan social commentary. Half-way through, Dave delivers an impromptu speech, a Millenials' lament that concisely indicts the barrenness of 21st-century existence. Fundamentally, "Dave Made A Maze" is a thought-provoking rumination on the creative spirit and how it can overwhelm us, and that perhaps we should just let it sometimes.