SLIFF ’11 Review: ‘THE MAN IN THE MAZE’

We continue our St. Louis International Film Festival coverage with one of the few, if not only, straight horror films of the festival, The Man in the Maze.

The film starts off with three people in the woods captured by a man with his face wrapped in bandages. Before he can carry out his murders, a fourth friend comes and knocks out the mysterious man. Once his friends are released and the villain is tied to a tree and made sure that escape would be highly unlikely, the friends begin to try to find their way out of the heavily wooded area.

The film is  the debut of filmmaker Mitesh Kumar Patel and stars some relatively unknowns. I remember seeing stills of this film earlier this year and was immediately thinking of Nacho Vigalondo‘s briliant science fiction film Timecrimes. The villain looks a lot like the same design of the bandaged man from Vigalando’s film. While I was willing to give the benefit of the doubt, after seeing the film, it looks like Patel liked Timecrimes as well and plagiarized aspects of that superior film to get this substandard, cheaply shot film out on the market before the inevitable remake – which had been planned for years via Dreamworks. The good news is for anyone who has or will see Timecrimes will see right through the paper thin story of The Man in the Maze.

Now I know what you might be thinking, “plagarism” is a very strong accusation and, surely, I’m blowing it out of proportion. I assure you that I do not throw around that word without really thinking about it. The highlights of the film, if you want to even call them that, are the exact elements from Timecrimes time travel aspects. However, The Man in the Maze lacks the smarts of Vigalondo’s film where his time travel aspects are explained where as Patel’s creation loosely bases it off an Indian curse of the soil in the woods. For the majority of the film you are subjected to horrible actors that spout out dialogue written by multiple writers as the characters try to find themselves to their car. What’s worse is that while the characters know they need to escape the woods, they still have time to worry about possible love interests that seem to take more precedence. The film is poorly written and what makes it even worse is that according to IMDb, Patel came up with the original story and then it was rewritten multiple times as evident by some of the weirdest division of credits. I assume that they didn’t want a credit of five different people working on the story as it is so blatantly clear how bad the writing is. While the opening credits only have a “story by” credit which credits the director, Mitesh Kumar Patel, and no “screenplay by” credit which in the end credits, after Patel has a producer, director and story by credit title card as well as the same credit in the credit crawl. We also see that two people worked on the screenplay during the credit crawl, Matthew Bakula and Michael Mitchell while IMDb references a different spelled Matthew Bakula as a collaborating writer, Michael Mitchell as an adapter as well as a credit for the Director of Photography, Josh Hodgins, and a “revised by” credit by Steve Hester. Since The Man in the Maze feels like a homemade, amateurish production, I marked up as a rookie mistake. Note to filmmakers, make sure your credits are consistent across IMDb and your film credits. Also, there is no need to reference your self as the producer, story writer and director three times in total on your film. It looks not only amateurish but a bit cocky as making a film is a team effort.

I’m kind of amazed that this was accepted by SLIFF to be quite honest as I have seen more flawed films that have more promise towards a filmmaking team. Patel, according to IMDb, has three films in pre-production. I hope he surrounds himself among people that give him more grounding and don’t mind saying that something doesn’t work as opposed to just agreeing with him in order to get some sort of credit on the film.

On the plus side, the technical aspects of the film are executed pretty well for a homemade production – the film was shot with a Canon XH-A1 and within the opening shots, you will find some nice looking crane and dolly shots. Also, one scene – while it doesn’t make much sense logically – in the foggy woods looks dreary, haunting and attempts to establish some sort of moody atmosphere before it is revealed that the fog was simply an excuse to hide something that the characters wouldn’t be able to make out – ugh.

The Man in the Maze is a film that should be lost in a more complex maze so it may never find it’s way out. Patel should be ashamed of himself thinking he could get away with stealing from what I think is one of the better sci-fi films in the past decade. Not only is it insulting for his career but it is insulting to genre fans to think that no one would notice.