FEATURE FILM

Meridian

A deserted cliff. Lightning appearing out of nowhere. A mysterious lady all dressed in white. Netflix’s latest original program, “Meridian,” is spooky, confusing, and only 12 minutes long. That’s because although “Meridian” is available on the streaming service worldwide, it was made not for Netflix’s 83 million subscribers, but for algorithms and their programmers. Director Curtis Clark likely had artistic reasons for adding the film’s strange effects. But those elements are primarily there because they tend to trip up video codecs, or software that compresses and decompresses digital video, and other elements of the streaming pipeline.