[Film Review] Elevator Game (2023)

The best thing about urban legends is the delicious thrill of the forbidden. Don’t say “Bloody Mary” in the mirror three times in a dark room unless you’re brave enough to summon her. Don’t flash your headlights at a car unless you want to have them drive you to your death. Don’t play the Elevator Game unless you want a dark passenger to open a vortex to hell and drag you into it. Needless to say, the youths aren’t great at the “don’t” part of these stories.

The rules of the Elevator Game are a little more involved but not so complicated. Find an elevator; one that is suitably creepy and hopefully in a haunted building for those extra vibe points, and initiate the order of floors to coax the alleged ghost who will ride with you. Take it first to the fourth floor. Then the second, sixth, back to second, up to ten, and then the fifth. Close your eyes on the fifth floor. Do not open them. This is where she will get on. Do not open your eyes. Do not open them until the doors close. Hit the button back to one and if it works, the elevator will actually rise back to the tenth floor where it will open a portal and she will take you to her world. But if you opened them? She will take you.

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Guess what approximately half the cast does? There must be some correlation with cultural backgrounds and the inability to follow through on supernatural rules because one by one, little white girls will always succumb to Ouija boards and seances and urban legends that all have basis in facts, at least in movies. Bloody Mary will get them, someone they really didn’t want to contact will haunt them, and the mysterious dark lady will strew their viscera all over the old-timey buttons of an elevator that has not been updated since perhaps the 1920s.

Nightmare on Dare Street is a podcast run by a group of intrepid and cool young twenty-somethings that do spooky things in spooky places, seemingly to cash in on lucrative popularity that is the cross-section of horror and true crime. When they can’t come up with their next episode, newcomer Ryan (Gino Anania) suggests this Elevator Game he’s heard of. Apparently, a girl disappeared while playing it. Wouldn’t it be something if they did it in the very building she allegedly was last seen in? Ratings cha-ching.

The storyline is convoluted by the interpersonal drama of the young cast who both look and act like they’re barely out of their teens and basically confront their human and supernatural issues as children would. Ryan’s covering the fact that the missing girl was his sister Becki and he infiltrated the gang because there’s some tenuous link between one of the hosts, Kris (Alec Carlos), and her. While some attempt is made to take a stand against the predatorial aspects within this genre as a whole with the group planning to oust Kris, the overreaction to Ryan’s involvement, which quickly becomes the focus of the other host Chloe (Verity Marks), takes the lead. It allows Kris to play it off in an “aw jeepers creepers my bad” manner that dismisses the fact and the story gets stuck on these inconsequential bickering’s rather than the supernatural horrors developing. Or attempting to develop.

Chloe, Kris, and a third crew member Matty (Nazariy Demkowicz) play the game incorrectly in their attempt to recreate it for their podcast. This unleashes the ghost on them and it’s up to Ryan, still desperate to find his sister, to play it correctly and make it to the hell world and back, to save them. But the trouble with a story about one urban legend about an elevator is that there is not much to do visually besides keep showing the cast going up and down in a literal box. And after we see it that first time in the opening with Becki, it does become repetitive. 

An attempt is made to build the origins of the woman and her lingering ghost, but it is a hastily constructed backstory that is thrown to the audience in the stereotypical scene of online research with no clear reasons for why we should now sympathize with the ghost’s demise or why it has become legend. There’s no way to save Becki or themselves but Supernatural fans will appreciate Matty’s desperate attempts at a salt circle. Doesn’t quite work when it’s not a biblical demon, though. It’s perhaps why the end meanders and inevitably ends with no way to end the ghost’s ride. But it might also be director Rebekah McKendry’s stand against podcasters and influencers because the cycle continues with a new bouncy (white girl) brightly entering the elevator and hitting those buttons for her viewers. 

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