Sunday 10 February 2019

Elevator to Insanity


d./w. Nik Box; p. Nik Box, Ameng Zang; cast: Gus Capucci, Bryony, Kurt Dirt, Rob, Yuqi Zhang

Utterly extraordinary avant garde feature from Dead Good Films Like. It’s black and white, it has no (English) dialogue and most of its 70-minute running time is a young man standing patiently in an ever-rising lift. If you’re looking for a narrative feature, you’ll loathe this. But if you appreciate the weird and experimental, you might strangely enjoy it. After about five minutes of nothing happening, a young woman gets in and travels one floor. About five minutes later, she does so again. The third time she gets in, the man tries talking to her in Greek, to no effect. Later, other things happen, including repeated brief views of a woman dancing in a corridor and a third woman who gets in the lift and lets out a single continuous scream for three minutes. Box moves his camera around enough to keep our attention, and Capucci does a sterling job as the mysterious central character. Towards the end he does arrive somewhere, trust me. Shot at the University of Central Lancashire in 2015.