So here’s the thing: being an adult kind of sucks. We spend so much of our childhoods yearning for responsibility and the freedom that being of a certain age brings, but most of us probably failed to appreciate just how good we had it as carefree kids. And now, we are expected to transform ourselves into responsible grown-ups who have to spend the rest of our days worrying about bills, jobs, or even living up to the expectations of our significant others or other loved ones.
And those are the predicaments faced by the titular protagonist in Dave Made a Maze: do you settle for the life everyone else expects you to lead, or do you dare to follow the unbeaten path (which, in Bill Watterson’s delightful comedy, leads directly into a magical labyrinth within the confines of a box fort) in hopes of achieving a sense of personal fulfillment more so than getting a steady paycheck?
Not easy questions to answer, but Dave Made a Maze does an admirable job of tackling those ideas and wrapping them up inside a charming and wildly innovative adventure comedy that ambitiously sets a new bar for independent filmmaking with its infectious creativity.
As mentioned, Dave (Nick Thune) is a struggling artist who just turned 30, and his life is in something of a state of existential crisis. He’s unemployed (traditionally speaking), he feels isolated from his girlfriend, Annie (Meera Rohit Kumbhani), who is gainfully employed, and the biggest concern that has Dave’s attention at the moment we meet him is that he’s never once really finished anything he’s ever started. That’s when Dave gets the bright idea to construct a fort assembled from boxes and various materials he collects from around the apartment, eventually getting lost within his own cardboard oasis, which probably sounds kind of ridiculous, right?
Well, as it turns out, as he was building his sanctuary away from the world at large, Dave unwittingly gave birth to a labyrinth that manifests certain aspects of his psyche and fears (and in one instance, it creates a giant version of a woman’s nether regions crafted out of cardboard and construction paper), and the further he gets in building the fort, the deeper he gets lost in its jumbled pathways filled with traps and various papery creatures—some good, some very, very bad. When Annie discovers Dave hidden away, she panics and asks his best pal, Gordon (Adam Busch) for help, who, in turn, invites pretty much everyone in the neighborhood over to bear witness to Dave’s baffling predicament. Realizing they must go into the fort on a rescue mission, Annie, Gordon, and handful of others enter the maze, unprepared for all the weirdness and deadly mayhem that awaits them.
On a story level, there’s so much about Dave Made a Maze that really spoke to me, just because I went through something similar when I turned 30 (which led me to my current vocation), so in many ways, I once was Dave, and I immediately connected to his character on an emotional level. Beyond the thoughtful script crafted by Watterson and Steven Sears, Dave Made a Maze is a visual triumph in every sense of the word, and one of those rare movies that can be emphatically declared as a one-of-kind cinematic experience—and there’s no hyperbole in that statement at all. DMaM wondrously unique and brimming with a real love of creativity and a passion for filmmaking, and I hope every single person who loves offbeat and off-kilter storytelling seeks it out immediately.
There is such a low-fi charm to Watterson’s approach to the fantastical elements of Dave Made a Maze, and I mean that as the ultimate compliment to the director’s decision to fabricate the film’s major set piece around pulpy materials. The maze itself is a breathtaking feat of production design, and if this was a “bigger” film (meaning: studio), there’s no doubt in my mind that we’d see Dave Made a Maze up for an Academy Award next year. Watterson also uses some other unusual techniques like origami, forced perspective, lunch bag hand puppets, and marionettes, and all of these methods infuse DMaM with a sense of whimsy and childlike wonder.
For those of you out there who have ever dared to follow your dreams, still yearn for something more in life, or are looking for a light-hearted escape from the nastiness that our reality delivers up on a daily basis, I cannot recommend Dave Made a Maze enough. It’s precisely the shot in the arm I needed (both personally and professionally), and I love that someone dared to make such a wonderfully weird celebration of the creative spirit.
Movie Score: 4/5
Heather A. Wixson was born and raised in the Chicago suburbs, until she followed her dreams and moved to Los Angeles in 2009. A 14-year veteran in the world of horror entertainment journalism, Wixson fell in love with genre films at a very early age, and has spent more than a decade as a writer and supporter of preserving the history of horror and science fiction cinema. Throughout her career, Wixson has contributed to several notable websites, including Fangoria, Dread Central, Terror Tube, and FEARnet, and she currently serves as the Managing Editor for Daily Dead, which has been her home since 2013. She's also written for both Fangoria Magazine & ReMind Magazine, and her latest book project, Monsters, Makeup & Effects: Volume One will be released on October 20, 2021.
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