Elevator Game‘s So-So Horror Has Its Ups and Downs

Rebekah McKendry’s Elevator Game finds its place as a young adult horror for the TikTok challenge generation—but don’t bonk your head on its lower ceiling. Travis Seppala’s screenplay (David Ian McKendry gets an “additional writing” credit) lays a barebones foundation that deploys reusable tropes of urban legend storytelling. Characters are stereotypes whose personalities are derived from accessories like Bluetooth headsets (“The Manager”), and predictability abounds. There’s not much to Elevator Game, and McKendry struggles to find the film’s extra gear, which underwhelms in its familiarity instead of finding comfort in the YouTuber satirization that has become popular with the rise of social media.
The film follows spooky influencer collective Nightmare on Dare Street, who run a video channel dedicated to playing cursed games in supposedly haunted locations. New intern Ryan Keaton (Gino Anania) suggests the “Elevator Game,” pitching ideas five minutes into his first day. Talkative host Kris Russo (Alec Carlos) brushes away the suggestion, mocking the boredom of riding an elevator for 20 minutes, but an angry health drink sponsor demanding content overrides Kris’ apprehension. The crew assembles—including the Felicity Smoak-ish tech wiz Izzy Simpson (Madison MacIsaac), on-camera talent Chloe Young (Verity Marks) and nervous supernatural believer Matty Davis (Nazariy Demkowicz)—and finds a nearby elevator for their newest episode. What happens next you can probably figure out on your own.
Elevator Game’s narrative drive feels robotic. Everything (Ryan’s introduction, obvious ulterior motivations, an inability to overcome copy-paste caricatures of YouTuber culture) plays like a basic cable version of better movies. Titles like Deadstream or #chadgetstheaxe are more impassioned projects about social media obsessions driving deplorable behaviors. Elevator Game feels one-dimensional in comparison. You’re watching Elevator Game for the promised “Elevator Game” fright-fest—I get that—but the pedestrian composition of Nightmare on Dare Street’s communal arc is distractingly textbook.