Dave Made a Maze

2017
Story by Steven Sears
Screenplay by Steven Sears and Bill Watterson
Directed by Bill Watterson

Sometimes life is a journey of frustration. Sometimes every direction you turn just ends up in the same dead ends, you feel like you are going no where and stuck in the same rut you’ve always been. Dave Made a Maze takes this and runs with it, throwing in some millennial angst to churn the butter. It isn’t just about a guy who made a maze out of cardboard. It’s about the passion of wanting to make your mark in the world and getting totally lost and overwhelmed while doing so. Dave Made a Maze is not for everyone, you’ll do better if you haven’t hit your 40s or if you spent years of your life wandering in an aimless haze, thinking you were destined for great things but never actually making or achieving those great things.

There is a lot of love with the design of Dave Made a Maze, it takes a lot of care to make things look so good at looking so cheap. The effects are crafty, like the whole thing is an Etsy project that began multiplying and mutating out of control. The walls are made of a million cardboard boxes sacrificed for the good of art. There are traps in the maze, the traps are lethal, people die, but their blood is an explosion of red strings and glitter. Like all good labyrinths, the layout is constantly shifting, this maze is growing, and there is a minotaur running around. At one point the characters become paper bag puppets, and there is a mysterious seductive vortex that looks suspiciously like a vagina.