DailyView: Day 72, Movie 124

I remember seeing trailers for this movie and having a laugh that they did not want to put the name of M. Night Shyamalan on the trailer. They would list something like “From the writer of The Sixth Sense” or something like that. M. Night was still pretty toxic at that point.

However, the film was a surprise for me. I enjoyed the film way more than I expected.

The basic premise is that five people are stranded together in an elevator as some magical force began to work on the building and the elevator which lead to the death of some of the passengers. A police detective (Chris Messina), who was working on a suicide case in the building already, took over the handling of the elevator case and desperately tried to save the remaining victims.

The claustrophobic setting created a great deal of tension in the elevator as you were never sure who was the one doing the killing. The movie implies that the devil can take the form of a human to punish those who deserve it, and we find that everybody in the elevator had a severely checkered past or were a downright rotten person.

Most of the cast were actors who I had not recognized or who have had roles that I was not familiar with. I recognized the Old Woman, as IMDB named her, in Jenny O’Hara and Logan Marshall-Green was a name I recognized (he played the first Shocker in Spider-Man: Homecoming). The other main actors of the film included Bokeem Woodbine, Caroline Dhavernas (from TV show Hannibal), Jacob Vargas, Geoffrey Arend, Matt Craven, Joe Cobden, and Bojana Novakovic.

It is far from a perfect film. The story is a bit conventional and there is little effects for the frights. The film does do a solid job with the low budget on creating the anxiousness of the tone.

In the end, I am happy that I gave this a chance. It was more entertaining than I thought it was going to be. Perhaps this could be considered the start of the M. Night Shyamalan resurgence with his new movie Old coming out soon.