De Lift [The Lift] (1983)

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) I wasn’t expecting much from De Lift, and while it’s an exaggeration to say that I was pleasantly surprised, the result is more interesting than I expected from a “killer elevator” horror film. Hailing from the Netherlands, this film takes on the cold tones of an Amsterdam mixed-used building having elevator troubles — fatal elevator troubles, as many sequences painstakingly show: As people are suffocated, fall to their death, get stuck in doors then decapitated, or simply burn for no explainable reason, it becomes clear to our repairman protagonist that something’s not right with the building’s elevators. Working with a journalist, he eventually discovers the reason behind the evil elevators, and surprisingly, it’s one that sends the film in unusually contemporary science-fiction territory: The elevator’s electronics rely on brand-new organic components that (to get back to more familiar and dumber territory) went crazy and turned evil. Still, the time spent in the techno-thriller genre is a bit unusual for a horror film that could have gone for demonic possession (such as 2010’s Devil), a building built upon a graveyard or other explanations from the usual playbook. I’m not going to pretend that the entire film is credible — In fact, it gets progressively crazier (such as with an ill-fitting domestic arc that has the wife screaming divorce at the most innocuous event) and crazier (ending with a CEO personally shooting a gun at the bio-computer, and the elevator taking revenge by somehow spitting out a cable to hang its killer) as it goes on. The early-1980s period feel is now an advantage, and so is the matter-of-fact European setting. Writer-director Dick Maas isn’t strong either in writing or visual presentation (well, save for featuring bright red elevator doors in the middle of a blue-tinged film.), but De Lift isn’t as silly as one could imagine from the obvious “killer elevator” pitch.