Written and Directed by Zeb Haradon.

If the most expensive of films can be the most depressingly vacant, it stands to reason that the cheapest can impress with their wit and verve. As barebones as the title ELEVATOR MOVIE would suggest, this black-and-white feature proves not only that a great deal can be made of very little, but that weirdo characters and situations can be explored with conviction and style.

After stepping into an elevator, shy, awkward Jim (Director Zeb Haradon) and confident, outgoing Lana (Robin Ballard) appear to be trapped. As Lana drops her bag of groceries, Jim leers over her heaving breasts and backside, and then decides to ask for help via the intercom. Following that unsuccessful attempt, Lana wins $3000 on a scratch card, and the two decide to sit tight until the elusive rescue.

Adapting to their environment, they take sustenance from the groceries in Lana’s brown paper bag, and relieve themselves in an emptied coffee tin as the other looks away. Getting to know one another, the two prove to be polar opposites. Lana is a sexually experienced born again Christian, virginal Jim is an atheist who believes in science and houses several perversions.

Waking in the morning, the pair discover that the grocery bag has been replenished and the shit can emptied. A week gone, the situation drags out, and they finally contact the lift operator. Chiding the pair for harsh language, he subsequently forgets about them. Days, weeks and months go by as the two are trapped in the lift. As Lana fills him in with details of her once active sex life, Jim’s desire is inflamed.

Although the two start irritating one another – she dislikes his clumsy advances, he ridicules her religious beliefs – they eventually agree to have sex, but are sabotaged when Lana’s vagina starts to mutate into a cluster of metal and wire. This doesn’t deter Jim, who has a fetish for anal sex, but his persistence infuriates Lana who recoils from him.

Soon after, Lana’s transformation develops to shocking extremes, forcing a lovelorn Jim to tend to her, and leading to a bizarre, funny and disconcerting climax.

If all a filmmaker needs to succeed is “a girl and a gun” – according to BREATHLESS director Jean-Luc Godard – ELEVATOR MOVIE goes one better. Using only two characters, a measly lift setting, and a bag of groceries for props, Haradon’s film makes the most of an oddball premise. Despite the limited resources, the inventive use of camera angles and surrealist juxtapositions of images - such as an erect penis squeezing into a shiny metal pipe - prevents our attention from wavering.

The elevator setting, so central to the film, is a touch of inspiration. An interval between spaces, it’s a no man's land that brings together two odd personalities for a claustrophobic chamber drama. Shy Jim and confident Lana, virgin and (ex) whore, atheist and believer. Character development is both inventive and economical, as at the beginning when Lana talks of being saved by religion, Jim glares at her cleavage, preoccupied.

As is so important for a film of this ilk, performances are very strong. Pretty in a way similar to German actresses of the past, Ballard plays the uptight Lana as the ultimate tease; eager to talk freely about sex but uptight when it comes to the crunch. Haradon convinces as the quiet pervert who has spent too much time by himself. His twitchy face veils a disturbing persona, revealed as a play he had written about a man who buggers his wife after she has died of cancer!

(Jim memorably defends it as a “metaphor for saying goodbye”, but Lana, who found the videos Anal Orgy, Anal Ecstacy, and Anal Amateur in his rucksack, knows better!)

Eschewing the unities of space, time and logic, this wonderful film never explains exactly why the two are trapped, and it doesn't matter. They exist in a frozen moment in which meaning is constantly pushed back, like the name on the tip of Jim's tongue, and the intercom operator who abandons the pair, to shouts of "Hasn't anyone complained? Hasn't anyone complained? Hasn't anyone complained that the elevator's not working?"

Thanks to Elisa and Zeb Haradon for this DVD-R screener.

http://www.elevatormovie.com/

Reviewed by Matthew Sanderson