culture / movies

Monday Morning Movie Review: De Lift (1983)

The Portly Politico32 Comments

When it comes to Dutch filmmakers, I tend to think of Paul Verhoeven, the director behind RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and Starship Troopers (1997), among other classics.  If that’s all the filmmaking genius to come out of Holland, the Dutch would be doing pretty good for themselves.

Well, it turns out there’s more to Dutch cinema than Verhoeven.  They also have a little film called De Lift (The Lift, 1983), which was apparently a point of pride for our clog-wearing friends in the Lowcountry (of Europe, not of South Carolina).  The flick is currently on Shudder, along with a slew of other interesting foreign films.

The premise is absurd:  an elevator built with biomechanical chips goes on a killing spree.  Yes, you read that correctly:  the elevator is the villain.  There’s even a point in the film when the elevator’s Frankensteinian creator shoots it in its “heart,” which had me falling out of my chair with laughter (metaphorically, of course, but it was hilarious).

For all of that absurdity, it’s actually a really good movie.  That’s a credit to writer-director Dick Maas (that’s a name that’s just inviting bawdy commentary), who took a completely ridiculous premise and made it fun and enjoyable—and compelling.

The film opens with two couples shutting down the bar in an Amsterdam high-rise.  Their annoying partying occurs amid a violent thunderstorm, which strikes the building while the couples are on its elevator.  The normal efforts to deal with this kind of occurrence inexplicably fail, and the foursome nearly suffocate to death.

Felix Adelaar, an elevator technician, is assigned to investigate the rogue elevator, but everything seems fine.  Still, something doesn’t add up, and Adelaar continues his investigations, joined by a plucky reporter, Mieke de Beer.  The elevator, unfortunately, continues to behave oddly, resulting in several deaths and injuries:  a night watchman is decapitated; a blind man walks into an empty elevator shaft (something that would never pass the censors now, but which was both horrifying and humorous to watch).

Naturally, Felix’s obsession with the elevator, as well as spending all of his evenings with a hot-for-The-Netherlands tabloid reporter, puts a strain on his marriage, which is already rocky at the start of the film.  Felix seems totally unconcerned with his wife’s desperation, though, which comes across as a little unrealistic (a strange criticism, given this movie is about a killer elevator), but it also demonstrates his obsession with solving the mystery of the elevator.

A great deal of the effectiveness of this film is in the execution.  It could have easily been played for laughs, and there is definitely a streak of black humor throughout the film.  But the script treats its premise and its characters seriously, and their motivations are mostly believable.  There are a lot of little details that flesh out the world in which these characters live, which have a Verhoeven-esque sense of satire to them.  Those bits of social commentary don’t detract from the experience at all, but rather enhance the believability of this admittedly outrageous premise.

One reason the film works is because of the inherit fear surrounding elevators.  Elevators are weird spaces.  We’ve probably all experienced being on a crowded elevator with strangers, in which nobody wants to make a peep, and we’re all just hoping to get off the thing before something embarrassing happens—or before it gets stuck!  And that’s always the fear, too:  we might end up confined in this tiny space for an indeterminate amount of time, dealing with claustrophobia, and the ever-present knowledge that we could, at any moment, plummet to our deaths in a cold, dark shaft.  After all, if the elevator is stopped, it might go without warning, too.

There was a terrible 2001 remake called Down, which engenders all of the worst elements of that era’s filmmaking.  Compared to De Lift, Down is crass and exploitative; it is the kind of movie you’d think De Lift would be if you just read the description.  The subtle humor and interesting characterization of De Lift are totally missing from Down, which is instead a boring, derivative movie that lacks the source material’s charm.

Skip the remake, watch the original.  You won’t regret it.

32 thoughts on “Monday Morning Movie Review: De Lift (1983)”

  1. Not a film I have seen after looking up a trailer. I was too young to watch that kind of film when it would have first come out. It’s not a film for me now either to watch.

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      • In Sweden it’s almost impossible to find certain movies and things. I don’t have all the services either here, since they’re so expensive. I’m betting it would be close to $80 a month if I had all of them. I can’t afford that today.

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        • Yes, the promise of streaming services was that they would liberate us from paying for channels we didn’t watch. Now, it seems, it’s just fractured the programs and movies we’d like to watch across multiple services, so we end up paying (if we choose to sign up for every service) what we used to pay for cable. D’oh!

          I just have Shudder, which is about $60 a year, and Hulu, for which I am currently paying $1.07 a month after taxes. I mainly keep Hulu because my Mom likes some programs on there, and it’s good to dip into some favorite shows on there occasionally. But pretty much all I watch these days is Shudder.

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  4. Ah, Paul Verhoeven. He really was a breed apart and his commentary on the media was very astute.

    Regarding De Lift, or as you Americans would say, De Elevator, I’ll have a look. Thanks for the review.

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  5. ‘Take the stairs, take the stairs, for God’s sake, take the stairs!’

    And as that tagline to an extremely funny trailer wrapped up, that’s what I was thinking. 😂😂😂

    Have you ever seen Killer Sofa? The lift isn’t the only man made killer on celluloid. Mwahahaha!

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