A young actor enters the elevator of a dilapidated hotel, ignoring the out of order sign. This is Rose Hepburn (Sophie Skelton), and frankly, she's terrified to stay in a three-star establishment while she's filming a horror movie. ("It takes them an hour to bring you coffee!") Following Rose to the elevator is a stammering, flustered man, who can't meet her eyes when he asks what floor she's on. The doors slam shut, and for the rest of British director Steve Johnson's low-budget, low-anxiety horror, we're stuck in the broken elevator with these two.
It starts off quite interesting with a guessing game about which of them is the predator. At first, Daniel is the obvious candidate. He's a cameraman on Rose's movie, and has clearly been following her (there are a bunch of memory cards in her bag). He is a creepy voyeur, possibly a dangerous stalker. But then, maybe there's more to Rose, who only landed the part after the first-choice actor disappeared under mysterious circumstances. She is self-absorbed and full of herself, belittling Daniel's attempt to get them out of the elevator: "You're not the hero we need, are you?" As a cat-and-mouse drama, this is intriguing to an extent, though let down by the heavy-handed dialogue.
What is really missing in this confined space is claustrophobia. (I've never been stuck in an elevator, but less glamorously, I was once stuck in a bathroom stall at a film company's offices; the maintenance man ran a screwdriver under the door so he could remove the lock. ). But that sweaty, near-nervous feeling of being trapped doesn't appear anywhere in the film. And where the script goes in its pulpy, nasty final twist struck me as an eerily misogynistic move.