'Elevator' Movie Review

There's a particular kind of film that lives or dies on its premise, and Stig Svendsen's Elevator (2011) doubles down on its hook before anyone has even pressed a button. Nine people, dressed up for a corporate party fifty-two stories above Manhattan, pile into a lift on a Friday night. The elevator stops between floors. One of them is wearing a bomb. The other eight have a couple of hours, give or take, before they all turn into a fine red mist on the basement floor.

That's the movie. No clever escape plan. No heroic outside crew. Just the elevator, the people inside, and the time running down.

If you've seen M. Night Shyamalan's Devil, the setup will feel familiar. Elevator came out almost exactly a year later, and the comparison is unavoidable. But where Devil leans on supernatural mythology, this one keeps things human and very of-its-moment. This is a post-2008 movie about a Wall Street nobody trusts, a country still rattled by terror anxiety, and a group of people who'd rather scapegoat the security guard than examine the building owner standing next to them. The bomb is just the timer. The real plot is who turns on whom first.

Here's why you should give it eighty-one minutes of your life: the cast.

Shirley Knight plays Jane Redding, the elderly woman who, partway through the ride, collapses from a heart attack and quietly admits she has a bomb strapped to her waist with a bicycle lock. By the time Knight made this film, she had been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (for The Dark at the Top of the Stairs in 1960 and Sweet Bird of Youth in 1962), won a Tony Award for Kennedy's Children in 1976, and picked up three Emmys along the way. She is, very simply, a legend. Elevator sits late in her filmography, before her passing in 2020, and watching her play a woman who has come to detonate a tower full of Wall Street types is the sort of casting that quietly carries the whole film on its back. She gets two short scenes of real screen time. She breaks your heart in both.

Then there's John Getz as Henry Barton, the morally bankrupt Wall Street kingpin whose granddaughter is the reason the elevator stopped in the first place. Getz is one of those character actors you've seen a hundred times without quite remembering the name. He played the doomed lover in the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple (1984), Stathis Borans in David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986), and the lawyer Sy in David Fincher's The Social Network (2010). Casting him as a corrupt finance villain in a confined-space thriller does half the work for you.

Aníta Briem (you might know her as Jane Seymour from the second season of The Tudors, or as the action-hero lead in Journey to the Center of the Earth with Brendan Fraser) plays Celine, a pregnant employee whose secret pregnancy turns out not to be the secret she should've been worried about. And Devin Ratray (yes, Buzz from the original Home Alone) plays Martin, a heavyset employee whose body becomes a literal plot point in the climax. His arc is the closest thing the film has to a soul.

What's interesting from a craft angle is that almost the whole film was shot on a single constructed elevator set at Panavision Studios in Los Angeles, over thirteen days. Second-unit work in New York City handled the exteriors. Director Stig Svendsen, a Norwegian filmmaker, was making his first English-language feature, having been introduced to writer-producer Marc Rosenberg at an Italian film festival in 2008. He wanted, in his own words, a suspense thriller in the vein of Hitchcock's Psycho or Polanski's The Tenant, where the room itself does most of the work. The film is a US-Norwegian co-production. World premiere at the Tromsø International Film Festival in Norway in January 2011, US theatrical rollout the following year.

Things to look out for while watching: the precise moment the elevator drops without warning and Don loses an arm in the doors. It's brutal, abrupt, the kind of practical-effect violence that low-budget thrillers used to do because they had to, not because they wanted to show off. Watch the way the camera, locked in the box, slowly shifts who's in the foreground as alliances inside the elevator change. And keep an ear out for the score by Herman Christoffersen and Bjørnar Johnsen (both Norwegian composers), which carries more of the dread than the dialogue does.

Now, the honest part. Elevator is not a great film. Its IMDb rating sits at 5.3 for a reason. Some of the writing leans on cliché, the granddaughter character is exactly as irritating as several reviewers have flagged (deliberate, but still), and a couple of plot beats, particularly the dismembering-the-body scene and the very tidy moral arithmetic at the end, feel staged rather than earned. The race subplot, which involves the security guard Mohammed being suspected because of the assumptions of his colleagues, is handled with more heart than skill. This is a B-movie pretending to be a chamber drama, and you can see the seams.

But here's the thing. Sometimes a B-movie pretending to be a chamber drama, with a two-time Oscar nominee strapping a bomb to her waist, is exactly what a Friday night calls for. Elevator is short and mean. It's genuinely tense in the middle stretch. It's the kind of streaming find that rewards low expectations and curious viewers. The doors close at minute one. By minute fifteen, you'll have picked who you'd push out first