“1 in every 6 women will be stalked in their lifetime.” “1 in every 10 men will be stalked in their lifetime.” “1 in 2 stalkers have a relationship with their victims.” So say Stalker’s opening captions. I don’t know whether these statistics are factual. I do know that the second statement telegraphs the Gender-Inverted twist (that and a certain dialogue exchange with about 30 minutes to go means that we spend the third act pretty much just waiting for the other shoe to drop), but that is neither here nor there. The point is, stalking is a very serious and very real issue.
Incidentally, main character Daniel Reed (Stuart Brennan) claims he likes films that are “more real [than, say, Die Hard].” It’s his bad luck to be stuck in a phony Elevator Failure movie with a title that constitutes false advertisement (it doesn’t help either that the elevator shaft is a crudely rendered computer-generated image). Since you’re so keen on stats, how often does a stalker and their prey find themselves, accidentally or otherwise, trapped in a lift?
Moreover, how are we supposed to take seriously a film wherein the female lead is an actress starring in a horror flick directed by Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart? (well, it’s Bret ‘The Hitman’ Hart playing the character of the director, but still). Or a film that expects us to believe that the villain controls a rickety old elevator with a fucking app? Or, indeed, a film called Stalker that, by virtue of its own chosen setting, features absolutely no stalking?
Like I said, stalking is very real and very serious. Stalker, on the other hand, is exploitative and lazy and feels at times like it was in fact written and directed by the Hitman — right after Goldberg concussed the shit out of him, that is (in particular the far-fetched, schizophrenic cop-out climax).
Consider this: when Daniel brings up his taste in movies, the other main character, Rose Hepburn (Sophie Skelton), replies that “Wanting your films to be real sounds like kind of an oxymoron … Movies are make-believe. Nothing’s real.”
But she then adds, “I guess there are exceptions. This lift, for example, it’s, uh, it’s feeling pretty fucking real right now.” Um, the hell? Are the filmmakers suggesting that the characters know, or at least suspect, that they are in a movie? Or is this their way of hinting that Stuck in an Elevator films are to be considered “real” and, by extension, “serious,” after all? The latter of which, mind you, still wouldn’t explain why they thought they were making a movie about stalking.
PS. At one point, Daniel asks Rose if she believes that Grant (the aforementioned Hitman) may be behind their current predicament. “I don’t think Grant is this creative,” she answers. I for one loves me a movie about two people talking in small spaces (e.g., Tape, Chinese Coffee, Madrid, 1987, even Malcolm & Marie), but make no mistake; the situation itself is not creative, and it has little chance of being so when the circumstances are artificial, as in Stalker, as opposed to natural and organic, as in those films I just mentioned.
90% of Everything is Crap 