Haunted by the disappearance of his sister due to an urban legend, Ryan infiltrates a group of vloggers who specialise in completing online challenges in haunted spaces, hoping to persuade them to play the Elevator Game.
The latest film from director Rebekah McKendry (Glorious), who is also the host of the podcast Colors of the Dark, Elevator Game sees a group of people challening an urban legend with a complicated set of rules that can potentially lead to visiting another dimension, but first they must come into contact with an entity known only as “The Woman on the Fifth Floor”. When the group is disrupted during the game, they unknowingly unleash an evil that seeks bloody and unrelenting vengeance.
Inspired by the Korean urban legend, Elevator Game is a film with a glimmer of a good supernatural story that never quite reaches its full potential. The creature known as “The Woman on the Fifth Floor” can at times be visually terrifying, and her physicality and movement are sometimes reminiscent of Yūrei and similar beings from Japanese horror movies and folktales. Director Rebekah McKendry seems to have taken some cues from the Japanese cinematic movement, and it’s possible that the movie would have thrived more if it had leaned into the aesthetics and deep sadness expressed in films like Hideo Nakata’s Dark Water (2002), and Takashi Shimizu’s Ju-On: The Grudge (2002).
Instead, Elevator Game is haunted and hindered by strained and unnatural dialogue, and despite its relatively brisk running time of just over 90 minutes, the film suffers from lethargic pacing. Due to the focus being on the dynamics of the vlogger group the film doesn’t really deal with any sort of supernatural elevator action until much, much later on – which is why there’s a lack of solid world-building. This, combined with the rushed and abrupt ending means that Elevator Game gets stuck between floors and fails to deliver.
Elevator Game is out now on Shudder UK
