Gino Anania | Through the Shattered Lens

If nothing else, Elevator Game does open with a truly chilling sequence.

A teenage girl named Becki (Megan Best) boards an elevator in an office building. She’s playing a game, one that, if played correctly, will lead her to the spirit world but, if played incorrectly, will lead to her being torn apart by the spirit of an evil woman. Why exactly anyone would want to play this type of game, I’m not sure. I mean, I wouldn’t play it and I don’t even believe in ghosts or spirit worlds.

Anyway, Becki travels from floor to floor, in a specific, pre-determined order. When she reaches the 5th floor, she is to keep her eyes shut from the moment the elevator doors open until they close. When she opens her eyes, she is not to look to see if anyone is standing behind her. It’s on the fifth floor that the game player is supposedly joined by the Fifth Floor Woman. The Fifth Floor Woman apparently doesn’t have anything better to do than to kill anyone who fails to follow the rules of the game. It seems like kind of a boring existence. I mean, if I was the Fifth Floor Woman, I would have an existential crisis about having to spend my entire “life” enforcing the arbitrary rules of an elevator game but again, some people are just really into rules. Some people have a panic attack if there isn’t a clearly defined rule book for them to follow and I guess that’s just as true among the dead as among the living. As for Becki, she does keep her eyes closed on the fifth floor but then she makes the mistake of using her phone to check over her shoulder, which gets her in trouble with the Fifth Floor Woman.

Again, the entire opening sequence is very well-done and suspenseful, with Megan Best immediately earning our sympathy as Becki. The scene where she reaches the fifth floor is genuinely scary, as is the moment when we realize that she is no longer alone on the elevator. Unfortunately, the opening is so strong that the rest of the film has a difficult time topping it.

After Becki disappears, her brother Ryan (Gino Anania) gets an internship with a group of streamers who film themselves investigating paranormal rumors and visiting places that are supposedly haunted. They play “scary games in scary places,” but they’ve also managed to tick off their only advertiser and now they desperately need to film something quick and on the cheap. Ryan, without bothering to share his personal connection to the case, tells them about what happened to Becki and he encourages them to film themselves playing the elevator game. Ryan is hoping that they can help him find Becki and, it’s hinted, he also wants revenge against of the streamers, Kris (Alex Russo), because Kris is the one who told Becki about the elevator game in the first place. The streamers play the game but, instead of finding Becki, they instead bring the Fifth Floor Woman into their world. Death follows.

Elevator Game suffers from a lack of compelling characters. The streamers are all clichés and not even Ryan is a particularly likable character. I mean, you really do have to wonder just what exactly Ryan thought would happen when he tricked a bunch of other people into playing the same stupid game that Becki played. Why did he believe that dragging all of them into it would somehow make it easier to him to find Becki? Once people start dying, it’s pretty much Ryan’s fault and it’s hard not to get annoyed with the fact that no one really seems to call him out on it. If anything, Ryan’s actions were so selfish that one could argue that he’s as much of a villain as the Fifth Floor Woman, despite the film’s attempts to portray him as being a loving brother.

That said, there are a few effectively creepy sequences and the scene where Ryan visits the so-called “Red World” was extremely well-done and vividly visualized. Even though the film tests just how many times a viewer can be expected to watch people ride an elevator from one floor to another, I’ll admit that my heart started to beat a little bit harder whenever anyone stopped at the fifth floor. “You forgot to shut your eyes!” I yelled at the screen at one point. Of course, it didn’t do any good. Rules are rules.

Elevator Game is currently streaming on Shudder.

Based on a true story, Lifetime’s Abducted By My Teacher opens with a situation that I related to all too well.

15 year-old Elizabeth Thomas (Summer H. Howell) is the newest student at the local high school. She’s starting school in the middle of the year and she doesn’t know anyone at the school. Everyone is wondering why she’s enrolling so late in the semester. No one wants to run the risk of being the new girl’s friend. Elizabeth can’t even find a table where she can eat her lunch. Now, when I was growing up, my family moved frequently. I started and left a lot of different schools and that meant that I got used to being the new girl. I got used to people asking me questions about my past. I got used to having to fit into a social system that had been established long before I arrived. I learned how to make friends without becoming so close to them that it would hurt when I inevitably had to leave and go to a new school. It never became easily but I do think I managed to handle it about as well as anyone could. (Fortunately, I also had three older sisters to help me out.)

Elizabeth, however, has a problem that I never had to deal with. She’s not only the new girl but the high school is also the first one that she’s ever attended. Previously, Elizabeth was home-schooled by her unstable mother. Now, her father has custody of her and Elizabeth is experiencing public school for the first time. All of the teachers and her classmates know about Elizabeth’s past, leaving Elizabeth feeling like a freak.

However, things start to look up when one of her teachers, Tad Cummins (Michael Fishman), invites her to join the group of students who eat lunch in his classroom. Tad is one of those self-consciously cool teachers who insists that his students refer to him by his first name. He takes an immediate interest in Elizabeth and he even invites her to attend church with him and his wife. At first, Elizabeth isn’t sure how to react to Tad but, eventually, she comes to trust him. After all, he’s the only person at school who seems to care about her and he even helps her to get a job at a restaurant. (Elizabeth’s boss so respects Tad that she’s willing to hire Elizabeth on his recommendation alone.) Eventually, Elizabeth’s father (Gino Anania) grows suspicious of Tad’s interest in his daughter but, by that point, Tad has Elizabeth so in his thrall that he’s able to convince her to run off with him.

It’s a disturbingly familiar tale of grooming and abduction, one that features a sympathetic lead performance from Summer Howell and a memorably creepy one from Michael Fishman. From the minute that we first see Tad, we went to tell Elizabeth to stay away from him but, as this film show, things often look different when they’re actually happening to you than they do when you’re on the outside looking in. Tad is eventually reveled to be a messianic lunatic but, at the beginning, he’s simply the only person willing to give encouragement to someone who desperately needs it. Having no experience with public education and the outside world at all, Elizabeth is easily manipulated but eventually, she reveals an inner strength that even she didn’t know she had. Summer Howell does a wonderful job portraying Elizabeth’s transformation from being meek and easily manipulated to being strong and confident enough to face down her abductor in court.

This film was executive produced by Elizabeth Smart and Smart introduces the film. Elizabeth Smart is someone who has survived a trauma that most of us couldn’t even imagine but she’s since spent her life helping others who have been in similar situations. She deserves all the credit in the world.