Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!
“Technology gone amok” is one of the most common science fiction plots. If I asked you to think of a movie where people fight against the technology that they or someone else has created, where technology tries to take over, destroy humanity, or just starts killing, you could probably think of a dozen in less than a minute. Cult horror (Demon Seed, Videodrome, Chopping Mall, Hardware), low-budget exploitation films (Maximum Overdrive, Deadly Friend), genre classics (The Terminator, Christine), and mainstream blockbusters (Jurassic Park, Avengers: Age of Ultron) happily use and recycle this basic idea. Sometimes we get a classic. Sometimes, we get a movie where the people essentially line up to die. Such is the case with Dutch film The Lift (or De Lift if you prefer).
As the name suggests, The Lift is about a killer elevator. This is not a “people trapped in an elevator” movie like Devil, but a film where people are literally killed by an elevator through a variety of methods, or at least the variety of methods that could be used by an elevator. It’s not like the killer lift in question goes roaming through the streets looking for victims.
We’ll start with the opening salvo of the lift in question when a group of four drunken restaurant patrons. When they take the lift down after their meal, the building is hit by a power outage, trapping the people inside. However, when the power comes back up, the elevator doesn’t come back online. When it finally does open up, the people inside have passed out from the heat and are hospitalized. Enter Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel), lift technician, who goes to check it out, and it seems that everything checks out—there is no reason for the malfunction.
But, since this is going to be a killer elevator movie, we need some actual deaths, and we’re going to get some. A blind man signing documents falls to his death when the doors open in front of him without the elevator being there. Later, when this is discovered by a janitorial crew, the doors close on a man’s neck and the lift moves on its own to decapitate him. And still, there appears to be nothing wrong with the lifts according to Felix. It does, however, gain the attention of a local journalist Mieke de Beer (Willeke van Ammelrooy), who starts investigating with Felix.
The upshot of this plays out in a couple of ways. First, the relationship that Felix now has with Mieke causes his wife Saskia (Josine van Dalsum) to suspect he is cheating on her. This seems like a distraction, but it actually plays into the third act. The investigation also reveals that the microprocessors that run the lift are experimental, and the company that produces them is not willing to answer many questions about them. Mieke’s contact in the microprocessor field suggests that some computers in the past of malfunctioned and started to self-program, which appears to be the case here. Felix gets in trouble with his boss for his investigation, and with his wife and kids gone, he appears to have nothing to lose when it comes to pursuing his own investigation (see—his wife leaving actually turns out to be relevant).
For what it is, The Lift isn’t bad. If nothing else, the idea of a killer elevator is something that we haven’t really seen before (although director Dick Maas did remake this almost 20 years later, retitled Down). And it works, at least for the initial deaths. The people hospitalized feel like a freak accident. The blind man isn’t discovered right away, and the decapitation in a lot of ways for the people in the movie seems like the first actual indication that something is wrong.
But after that? When the elevator comes close to killing a child, when it kills another janitor? At some point, you take out the control system and put a sign up on the elevators that says they are out of order. Telling people that they have to walk up 14 flights of stairs to the restaurant is certainly going to hurt their business, but is it going to hurt it more than an elevator that randomly kills people?
Another issue is that the actual conclusion of the film is incredibly unsatisfying. There’s a way to end this well, and what we get isn’t it. It almost feels like it was set up to be a sequel—it literally ends on a cliffhanger with a bunch of loose ends left untied.
The Lift isn’t the worst entry in the “technology kills people” genre, but it’s not anywhere close to an essential film for anyone but a completist.
Why to watch The Lift: It’s certainly a unique villain.
Why not to watch: Seriously? Just take the stairs.