Abwärts

In 1983, there was a Dutch movie about a killer elevator called De Lift (which was remade by the director in 2001). Here's a German movie from 1984 about a killer elevator. Funny how that happens. Anyway, the one in De Lift was evil, but this one is just poorly designed and maintained.

Four people get stuck in an elevator: a couple, a younger guy, and an older man with a suitcase. The night watchman doesn't notice the problem since the alarm had been turned off for the repairman who'd been there earlier. They try to get out, hurting themselves and smashing up the elevator in the process. They bicker a lot. The hand-held video-game playing, walkman-wearing young man is annoying, and the woman is surprisingly slutty. The actress is rather unusual-looking, with eyebrows tweezed away to almost nothing, and hair in a style that emphasizes how high her hairline is and how thin her hair is. Whoever did that to her should never have gotten the job!

When repairmen come, they give the security guard a hard time. He has a German accent (the video I watched was dubbed in English), which they mock, and they complain about foreigners. I thought that was weird, since the movie was German. Did he have an American accent in the German-language version? I was also surprised that they try to raise the elevator car, rather than lower it; I wonder if that is the procedure in real life?

Still, I enjoyed this. It's not great, but is entertaining enough.

I wonder if the elevator horror subgenre is played out. Someone ought to have one involving a paternoster lift (look it up) - those are pretty unusual; a friend of mine had ridden one and told me about it.

Incidentally, the Worst Case Scenario Handbook writers have evidently advised the best way to survive a plummeting elevator is to lie down flat on the floor.

What sounds interesting in the first place, is the theme of the movie: Four people get stuck in a small lift. The question I asked immediately when I read this was: Can a movie that has only one setting be gripping and eventful? The answer is: Yes, it can! It only can. The movie is well directed and the lift is photographed from all views you can imagine. Still, all the directing ideas are used up now, there cannot be any new lift movie.

Unfortunately, in order to create a thriller full of action and suspense, they had to write a most unrealistic screenplay, full of coincidences and stupid twists. It's a pity, but obviously it shows that getting stuck in a lift is not suitable for filling a whole evening.

Oh, Hannes Jaenicke once played with Götz George and wasn't always just a chatterbox. Correction, he once played with Götz George. Here he seems to want to ask Schimanski, 'Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?' So that fits with the role: young, wild, fundamentally anti, already bitter, but different. Götz is Götz as always, Wolfgang Kieling has the words 'discontinued model' tattooed on his forehead, and Ms Soutendijk plays the femme fatale. The latter, as usual, is not in my world! Add to that Klaus Wennemann and Ralf Richter, with the celebrated prejudice that all craftsmen are loud-mouthed primitives. Otherwise, we find ourselves in a fantastic film. A wild constellation of characters in an impossible scenario. Cinematic, but only in Hollywood. The rest of the cinema world tends to try its hand at real life. Unrealistic is not necessarily implausible, however, and it is up to a film to achieve this balancing act. In my opinion, the scripted construct doesn't succeed at all in the beginning. It's contrived, which German films have been good at since before the 2000s. Nevertheless, praise is definitely in order, at least for the genre. When the focus is not on the background but on the circumstances, i.e. The inherently exciting elevator scenario, the thrill works. I think you have to be in the right mood here; depending on that, it will be average good or average bad. In any case, it's not boring, which is half the battle.

You can't really have anything against thrillers/action movies with a simple and straightforward premise. Especially not when they are, like "Abwärts", realistic and dealing with topics that are also the worst nightmare of half of the earth's population. People with severe claustrophobia beware, as much of the film takes place in a very narrow and bleak elevator cabin where four very diverse persons get trapped in on a Friday night. Partially psychological character study, but primarily nail-biting suspense thriller, "Abwärts" guarantees 90 minutes of uncompromising action footage, solid performances, and a good climax. The sound and sight of snapping cables, fraying wires, and creaking elevator doors are truly uncanny.

The plot: Four people are caught in an elevator. One is a business man, the annoying kind who is aggressive and complains about everything and everyone and is a walking-talking sample of distilled stress and hostility. Then there's his colleague, a woman who is much more pleasant in her character. A teenage rebel who just broke into a coke machine and by his mere presence drives the businessman mad, and an older guy who just stole 100,000DM make up the rest of the cast...

The movie is all about how they cope with their problem, as time goes on and on without any success in reaching the outside world, as the lights go out, and as the cables begin to snap one after the other....

And yet, it isn't too exciting. The characters are stereotypes. The story is stupid and unlikely (how could so many things go so wrong in just one elevator?). You don't like the characters very much, you just hate one of them. And all the twists and turns in the plot are not contributing to the excitement, they are just stupid excuses for filling yet another few minutes with dialogue as the screenwriters keep running out of inspiration and ink on a full-length movie set in an elevator.

Let's just hope "Phone Booth" will be a better effort...