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THE LIFT
(Der Lift)
Rating: 
Netherlands. 1983.
Director/Screenplay/Music – Dick Maas, Producer – Matthijs Van Heijningen, Photography – Marc Felperlaan, Special Effects – Leo Cahn, Makeup – Nancy Baudoux, Art Direction – Harry Ammerlaan. Production Company – Sigma Films.
Cast:
Huub Stapel (Felix Adlaar), Willeke van Ammelrooy (Mieke de Beer), Josine van Dalsum (Saskia Adlaar)
Plot: Lift technician Felix Adlaar becomes fascinated after he is called in to repair the elevator in an office building that has been the focus of several bizarre deaths. As the deaths continue, Felix’s obsession with trying to understand what is happening with the lift starts to get in the way of his family and job. Joining forces with a woman journalist, he uncovers the involvement of an American multi-national Rising Sun corporation who have installed an experimental protein chip computer in the elevator.
This Dutch horror-come-sf film developed a modest reputation in Europe and at various film festivals when it came out. It is an occasionally effective film. Director Dick Maas achieves some nicely eerie set-pieces and quite effective shocks at various intervals throughout. In particular, the last ten minutes as Huub Stapel ascends the shaft to investigate the heart of the elevator contains some quite intensely wound suspense. (Although oddly the one thing Maas never does is use the elevator for a sense of claustrophobia). He also has quite a sense of black humour and plays visual jokes – the film opens on a scream that only turns out to be shrieks of female laughter; or where Maas cuts from a decapitation to a cigar cutter or from suffocated party-goers being found in the elevator to a screaming ambulance that turns out to only be a toy of Stapel’s son; or in the midst of a tense scene at the climax, having a hand creep out of the edge of the frame to cover Stapel’s mouth, before being revealed to only be Stapel’s own.
Although ultimately it is a film that tries hard but doesn’t quite make the grade. While there are some effective shocks, most of the film is slow and dully paced. The major problem is that it is dragged down by a slow-moving subplot about Stapel’s wife believing he is having an affair with reporter Willeke van Ammelrooy that takes up a substantial part of the film. Yet it is a subplot that also seems ultimately pointless in that the issue is never resolved by the end of the film. The film is also marred by some atrocious dubbing. Probably what makes the last ten minutes work well is that they dispense with the bad dubbing – the scenes are entirely without dialogue – and allow the audience to concentrate solely on suspense. The script’s talk of molecule-sized protein computer chips is rather nonsensical, although the idea does unwittingly touch upon the ideas of nanotechnology well before the notion was ever named.
Dick Maas went onto a number of other films. He is probably best known for the comedy Flodder (1986) and sequels. He later conducted an American remake of The Lift as Down/The Shaft (2001) starring James Marshall and Naomi Watts. His one other genre film was the acclaimed serial killer thriller Amsterdamned (1998).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1999-2012
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