Elevator Game (2023) – Going Down!

IMPORTANT NOTE: This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movies being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Released: 15th September
Seen: 20th September

One of the most strangely fascinating subgenres of horror is one where a weird thing on the internet turns out to not only be real but deadly. Films like Slender Man, Grimcutty and Countdown all took modern technology and twisted it to become something strange and deadly, a kind of modern-day campfire story that takes a technology we’ve all become used to and turns it into something truly terrifying… or at least, that’s what it’s supposed to do. You might notice the trio of examples mentioned earlier are some of the worst horror films released in the last five years and sadly, Elevator Game joins them in that group of horror movies that takes a potentially interesting modern story and just does nothing with it.

The titular Elevator Game is fairly simple, you get on an empty elevator and proceed to waste a bunch of time by going to different levels in a specific order. Once you get to the fifth floor you have to close your eyes as a mysterious woman gets on and don’t say anything to her, if you do that correctly the elevator goes up to the 10th floor and you get to enter a portal to hell (because who doesn’t want to go to hell?) but if you get it wrong then The Fifth Floor Woman will tear you apart. Turns out that the sister to our main character Ryan (Gino Anania) played this game and went missing so, for reasons that could be interesting if anything were done with them, Ryan enlists the stars of an internet ghost show to play the Elevator Game in hopes that they can open the portal and save his sister… they can’t save the movie though.

Fairly early on in the movie, one of the main characters has a line that really should’ve been repeated to the creators of Elevator Game when they were pitching it… “No one wants to watch us ride an elevator for 20 minutes”. It’s a fairly decent line that makes a fairly decent point, so why did everyone think that the audience would want to watch a bunch of characters with no personality beyond “Annoying” and “A different kind of annoying” go up and down in an elevator for even longer than 20 minutes?

This is not suggesting that you can’t make a film that takes place in one confined location, look back to something like Buried for proof that you can do it providing that what happens in that confined location is interesting with a sense of tension that can ebb and flow as needed… watching people hit a button and silently go up a half dozen floors of an office building isn’t interesting, it’s what I did last week when I went to a mall!

Of course, Elevator Game doesn’t just take place in the elevator (though so much of it does), there’s a lot of times when the ‘characters’ are outside and having what technically passes for conversations and none of it is interesting. Within a few minutes of meeting the core cast you will be rooting for The Fifth Floor Woman to hurry up and start the tearing apart process because every single character is some strain of unlikable, either by just being straight up cruel and annoying or being so dull that they can literally be sent off to a bus stop for half an hour without anyone giving a shit. It’s not the fault of the actors who are clearly doing the best they can with what they’ve been given, they’ve just been given absolute garbage to work with and they can’t even push it into being campy because for some reason a film about a ghost who haunts an elevator wants to be taken dead fucking seriously.

Speaking of that ghost, it also doesn’t help that the rules of the Elevator Game don’t seem to be consistent at all. Part of the fun of these kinds of films where there’s a set list of instructions that must be followed in order to get the good outcome is seeing when those rules get broken, realising that means that something is going to happen and getting more and more tense the longer things go on.

To use a classic example, there’s a reason why Scream has Randy Meeks explaining the rules to survive a horror movie while every person in the house is actively breaking every single rule, because it told the audience that everyone in that house could die at any minute. Elevator Game doesn’t seem to believe in that because the rules are clearly explained and followed to the letter but still somehow broken and the promised punishment (which is meant to be instant) not only doesn’t happen right away but is very different from what was brought up. This means there is no tension because it becomes apparent that rules don’t apply, it’s just going to do whatever which kills so much of the anticipation.

Then there’s just the fact that Elevator Game looks incredibly dull, if you told me they filmed with no permits in an abandoned building in the middle of the night I would believe you without a second thought. The visuals are never interesting enough to make you curious, the Fifth Floor Woman looks like she’s wearing a shitty Halloween mask half the time and instead of doing anything interesting to represent hell, it’s just a bright red light shining on a normal street. Hell is bad lighting, such a great way to represent an idea that’s meant to be terrifying.

These problems can’t just be something that’s caused by a low budget, a creative person would be able to find a way to interestingly represent hell on film but it doesn’t feel like anyone wanted to take the time required to make the interesting creative choice so just get someone to put their foot on the brake of a really big car and let the red rear lights illuminate the street, surely that’ll do the job, right?

Wrong. Elevator Game is somehow less interesting than actually riding an elevator up a single floor. Bad characters, a stupid concept, absolutely nothing scary whatsoever and some of the blandest visuals imaginable combine to create a film that could not be more boring if it tried. There’s just nothing here, this idea would barely be enough to make for a decent short film but stretching it out for 90 minutes is almost cruel. If you’re thinking about trying Elevator Game… just take the stairs.