ELEVATOR GAME - Mark Reviews Movies

Elevator Game, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 14, 2023

There are some broadly neat ideas in Elevator Game. None of them, though, is developed in a satisfying or particularly competent way.

The setup here revolves around a seemingly invented urban legend, in which someone in an elevator pushes buttons to different floors in a certain order and, in doing so, invites a malevolent spirit to enter the elevator's cabin. If the person looks at or speaks to the ghost before the doors close, that person's body and soul will be "ripped to shreds," and director Rebekah McKendry gets a decent amount of tension from this basic description in a prologue.

Yes, some poor teenage girl (played by Megan Best, giving a pretty convincing performance of rising fear—one that turns out to be the best piece of acting in the entire movie, unfortunately) tries out the experiment. It's a good reminder that it's often better to have less information about some potentially scary situation, because our minds fill in all of the little details and possible outcomes of such a situation with more dread than a filmmaker can usually pay off by the end.

In other words, watching this teen go up and down in this elevator, with the floor-indication lights dinging with a steady rhythm and the relative silence of the ride giving a beat and a sense of anticipation to what could happen next, has some suspense to it. We don't know what, if anything, is going to occur, although it would be a very short movie if nothing happened when this teenager reaches the fifth floor, supposedly where the Fifth Floor Girl is waiting to board the elevator. Maybe McKendry and screenwriter Travis Seppala should have kept this material a short, because, once the movie makes it clear that its ghost and its payoff are as predictable as can be, there's really nowhere else for the story to go.

To be fair, the filmmakers try something slightly clever. Our main characters are a group of recent high school graduates who run an online video channel. Their show examines such urban legends and gets enough views that they have a substantial sponsor for the content. That sponsor is getting antsy, because host Kris (Alec Carlos) hides the product when he's talking about it, leading producer Kevin (Liam Stewart-Kanigan) to get an angry phone call. If the next episode doesn't go live in a week and make a big deal of the advertisement, there goes the channel's funding.

The somewhat amusing conceit here is that we're watching a team of filmmakers, including head researcher Chloe (Verity Marks) and tech expert Izzy (Madison MacIsaac) and new intern Ryan (Gino Anania), basically make the same kind of movie we're watching. After Ryan suggests the elevator legend could be a quick and easy episode, the team makes their way to the local office building where the girl from the opening sequence disappeared, and Izzy notes that a behind-the-back shot of the group approaching the building would look cool, as we're watching them approach the building from behind. Kris is skeptical that watching people ride in an elevator for 20 minutes could be entertaining, and all of those cameras had better be in the right place to capture what could happen.

It's kind of smart to reference what the filmmakers need to do and how horribly wrong it could go, and that's about the end of the movie's minor innovations. The rest of the plot, as one could probably guess, keeps going after the game has been played, introduces an entire alternate dimension without any setup or warning, gives a back story to the ghost and why it haunts this elevator (or all elevators, since the mythology is never clear in that regard), and watches as most or all of these characters are killed off one or two at a time.

The obvious routine mostly undoes it, and the rest of it is the generally obnoxious or bland characters, the silly and/or undercooked mythology, and the inconsistency of the killer ghost's methods. Sometimes, the Fifth Floor Girl gets right the point, punching a hole through a victim's throat or slicing another's head in two, and at other times, it toys around with a target in ways that feel more about trying to scare us than making it a legitimate threat (A bit involving a bus stop vestibule is especially egregious in that regard). That the mostly obscured phantom just looks like a young woman going through a goth phase doesn't help matters, but then again, not much about the predictable, accidentally goofy Elevator Game helps it in any way.

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