At a fancy restaurant on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise office building two couples are finishing their meal and are the last to leave. Outside of the restaurant is a bank of three elevators. They get in the middle one and push the button for the lobby. Part way down a power failure occurs. The elevator stops and the air conditioning stops. When the power comes back on and the doors finally open the two couples have been overcome with heat exhaustion.
Felix Adelaar (Huub Stapel) is an elevator technician who works for the Deta Liften Company in Amsterdam, Netherlands. One of his clients is the high-rise building. Felix is sent to check out the lift and make sure the AC is running correctly. The general maintenance guy (Paul Gieske) takes him up to top floor and the control panel for the elevators. Felix checks things out and finds no problems.
Not long after that, a blind man (Onno Molenkamp) dies when he steps into what he thinks is the elevator but is really an open shaft. After that a security guard gets decapitated by the elevator when his head is caught in the closing doors as the elevator passes by him. Felix is sent back to the building to check things out but still comes up with nothing.
While he is working, Felix is approached by a reporter, Mieke de Beer (Willeke van Ammelrooy). She thinks there is more going on than just an elevator malfunction. At first Felix is noncommittal, but as more accidents happen, he begins to believe there is a conspiracy going on between the building management and the electrical company that provides the computers used to operate the elevators. As Felix and Mieke team up to investigate they end up down a rabbit hole involving questionable experiments and sentient computer chips.
“The Lift” AKA “De lift” was released in 1983 and was written and directed by Dick Maas. It is a Dutch science fiction horror thriller and a dark comedy. The comedy aspects of the film don’t always transfer well into other languages. An English language remake was done in 2001 titled “Down”. The remake was also directed by Dick Maas.
It amazes me that when we think of an inanimate object as being sentient, we automatically turn to the object in question being homicidal. We’re not talking possessed but actually alive. Possessed things are also usually evil but that’s something we expect. Here we make the prediction that human means menacing. In general, I can’t really argue with that. I suppose if you are stuck in one place and only able to go up or down it can get a little boring and annoying so some kind of diversion is desired.
Although the movie lacks in the plot department, it makes up for it in the gruesome way it disposes of hapless people that wander into their own destruction. Even though the plot is thin it is also rather farfetched. The weirdness of the premise adds humor and interest to the film. It ended up being a rather enjoyable horror movie. A little slow at times, but overall not bad.