Shudder Saturday: Elevator Game (2023)

I was slightly predisposed to disliking Elevator Game before I saw it because I saw the words "based on actual events"on the poster for it. While that's true, in terms of the silly social media trend of pressing elevator buttons in a certain order in the belief that you will see some other world or summon some spirit, or both, it's a work of fiction that only uses a small amount of truth as a starting point. It happens, and has been happening for decades now, but I am still allowed to be irritated when it's such a tenuous use of the phrase.

Anyway, the very simple plot is that a group of people who make videos debunking urban legends end up being asked to record themselves taking part in the elevator game. Viewers know this may not end well, having seen one young woman face a horrible fate at the very start of the film, but there's over an hour of the film dedicated to showing us the group participating in the game and dealing with the consequences of it.

Made by the people who delivered the slightly disappointing The Creatures Were Stirring (Rebekah McKendry directing, while her husband, David Ian McKendry, is tasked with joining Travis Seppala in the writing department), BUT also gave us the pretty great Glorious, Elevator Game isn't terrible, but it's missing some care and skill to make it any good.

While the game itself seems silly to someone like me (i.e. someone not interested in jumping on to any social media trend like a lemming), that wouldn't have been a problem if the rest of the film had made up for the dubious starting point with some enjoyable set-pieces and decent characters. There are some scares here that aren't too bad, for all they feel like weak imitations of scares from much better movies, but the characters and tone are never as strong as required (especially noticeable when someone walks into a restaurant to claim as much salt as possible in order to prepare some kind of protection).

Nobody onscreen is doing bad work, and I'll take a moment here to namecheck Gino Anania, Alec Carlos, Nazariy Demkowicz, Madison MacIsaac, Verity Marks, Liam Stewart-Kanigan, and Megan Best, they're unable to develop anything beyond the weakest of characterisations. No one character really stands out until you see who is being left for the final scenes, and I suspect most viewers will struggle, as I did, to be invested in the outcome of this. Ultimately . . . it's a film about people finding out after having fucked around. Which is enough to make me enjoy the few gore gags and shrug for the rest of the runtime.

I am sure that McKendry has the ability to make another properly good horror one day, but this isn't it. In fact, it feels like a big step backward when compared to the wonderful strangeness of her previous feature.

4/10

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