For a game of football/soccer to work you need all the right people (players) in the right places. you need a goal keeper to stop goal attempts, a line of defenders to prevent attacks reaching the goal, a line of mid field players to feed the attack, strikers to receive the ball and finish the attacks. You also need a coach/manager to organise and strategise with the team, a referee to keep control and a lineman to call off-sides. If any one of these vital elements were missing then the game will either become horribly unbalanced, or pointless to even continue playing, but the sport as we know it is free-form to a degree. Imagine a carefully pre-determined game of football/soccer where all the players must be in exactly the right positions at exactly the right times in order for the game to work as planned, even when it feels completely unnatural then anything like this would actually happen. That is how this movie works through and through, it’s a strange analogy I admit, but the situation, the events are so contrived that you have to accept the story within the story, told by a narration over the movie, that the devil himself has the power to pretty much influence anything he wants, down to the finest detail.
Five people get trapped in an elevator in a huge office block and one of them is the devil. It’s an interesting idea and I was looking forward to seeing how it was going to play out. We start with a suicide of some random person from the top of the building the events take place in. We are then briefly introduced to the characters as they one by one make their way to the elevator, so you think “ok who’s the devil out of all these people”. The film makers use a typical technique here and throughout the film to keep you asking questions and doubting your opinion. So a guy who looks fucking weird walks in, and I mean he looks weird like his face is all gaunt and dumb looking, yep he could be the devil, then an old woman walks in who looks wired on narcotics, wide eyed and mysterious, she could also be the devil, then a young late 20’s woman walks in, tries to avoid ‘signing in’ gets called back by security and through dialog says something relating to she wouldn’t ever claim to be somebody she isn’t, well she could do, she could be the devil. So they all get in the elevator, and the security guard joins them, he looks like a pretty ok guy, he works there, so he’s probably ok, does this make you suspect him right away? Sure, maybe he’s the devil despite this appearance. And lastly another guy runs to the elevator to join the crew, he looks like a ruggishly good-looking crackhead, standing looking at people like marilyn manson in a photoshoot, well he could definitely be the devil.
The movie has a narration which surfaces every once in a while. The narrator is actually one of the security dudes in the building who watches the ordeal on the elevators CCTV. The security guard (and narrator) is religious and soon as weird things start to happen, he knows the sort of things the devil tends to get up to, so he suspects the devil or some evil paranormal entity may be involved from the get go. So there’s a murder in the elevator whilst the lights go out and one of the occupants gets his jugular sliced, I won’t say who, but this is evident on the CCTV so the police become involved because we now have a homicide. The Cop in charge of this case (Chris Messina) initially sceptical about the security guard/narrators claims is revealed to be a recovering alcoholic who lost his wife and child in a hit and run accident in the recent past, I didn’t buy his suffering or his situation as his character depth is paper thin. But he’s basically “the cop” in a whodunit confined to an elevator with some weird shit going on.
They try to figure out who everybody is by name, but the elevators microphone system is conveniently unserviceable & nobody has a pen,of course. (The occupants of the elevator can still hear the cops/security through the elevators speaker system). The audience are with the cops here, they don’t really know who anybody is, so the cops start to work out who’s who from the lobby sign-in register. All the people are accountable for except for one. The ruggishly good-looking crackhead looking dude (Logan Marshall Green). So by now he’s our prime suspect.
As I touched on with the analogy in the first paragraph, Devil gets around it’s over-coincidental events by way of a story told to the audience by the narrator/security guy as some sort of prophecy that he’s aware of in great detail, he also talks to the detective through dialogue to communicate elements of the story to the audience, but this dude sure knows his stuff. The Devil has the power to take human form on earth, he can influence events any way he wishes, if anybody tries to get in the way of his actions he will kill them. The devil can come and collect sinners and take them to hell, which is exactly what he is doing here, collecting sinners, making them suffer, and taking them all to hell. We’re not only told what the Devil does, we are watching him do it whilst being spoon-fed the details.
Without giving away everything that makes this movie watchable, the story leads you along quite efficiently with a plausible investigation as to what is going on and who is who, but turns it around at the last minute revealing the chief suspect to be the chief victim in a round-about way. I wouldn’t label the outcome a ‘twist’ of any kind, it’s more of a ‘reveal’. The prophecy (the great convenience) plays out as told by our knowledgeable security dude, revealing the sinners for who they are and what they have done, but I was so annoyed with the seriousness of the events that have taken place previously in the lives of the two pivotal characters when it completely lacks any kind of emotional depth.
We really needed to know more about these characters, and needed the means to actually care about them more. The people in the elevator were revealed to all be bad people, and the cop who had lost his family turns out to be nothing more than an actor in a film, doing an ok job by reading some ok dialog. I wasn’t connected with anybody and for that reason, the movie fails. The scares that take place are not meant to repulse you, but to un-nerve you, and keep you guessing how the mystery will play out. I didn’t care who died, who lived, I just wanted to see who the devil is, and why he was doing what he was doing.
The music was pretty cool, some real eerie operatic sounding bits. I think it’s kind of a generic connection musically to the subject of Satan, where using dark opera of sorts as a representation as the voice of the devil. The films tone was pretty dark too, some nice photography and harrowingly presented external shots of the city of Philadelphia under cloud cover like a ubiquitous shroud of evil.
This is definitely not a “five people and a camera in an elevator” ordeal as there are just as many events take place outside the elevator as they do inside. But on a budget of $12million, I think the film makers have crafted a semi-enjoyable horror/thriller without the constraints of using too many locations, major effects shots and named actors. M Night Shyamalan wrote the story, and is the films only real commercial name. Miss it or watch it, it’s a simple one, but what really kept me going was the fact that it had one of the greatest elements any film could possibly have. A mystery.
