Monsters have overrun the world, but can’t reach areas above exactly 8,000 feet above sea level, in Elevation, a nifty new creature feature now playing in Prague cinemas. Utilizing minimal exposition and character development, this streamlined monster movie delivers the goods when it comes to the action, resulting in a brisk and largely tense 80 minutes.
Elevation stars Anthony Mackie as Will, a single father raising his young son Hunter (Danny Boyd Jr.) in one of the small mountain communities above 8,000 feet in the Colorado Rockies that represent last bastion of humanity. But with Hunter suffering from a lung disease and oxygen tanks running low, he’ll have to make a perilous journey downhill to resupply.
Will is still haunted by the death of his wife Tara (played in flashbacks by Rachel Nicks), a scientist who tried to find a way to kill the monsters but perished on a mission with colleague Nina (Morena Baccarin) for supplies of their own. Headed to the same lab in Boulder that also contains his wife’s research, Will convinces Nina to join him on the mission, and the gung-ho Katie (Maddie Hasson) tags along for good measure.
After a brisk 10-minute setup that gives us the background, Elevation wastes no time getting to the action as Will, Nina, and Kate trek across the mountains, through abandoned mineshafts, and over ski lifts amid an ever-present monster threat. Like the alien menace in A Quiet Place, the creatures here (called Reapers) are big, bad, and incredibly fast, and waste little time getting to our protagonists once they sense them.
Exactly how they sense humans is unclear, but the one hard-and-fast rule of Elevation—the height above sea level that the Reapers cannot cross—is exploited to great effect. Numerous scenes see characters racing back to safety uphill just in time before the monsters hit an imaginary wall and turn around.
The creature design here initially feels generic, with the tentacled, fluid-moving Reapers feeling an awful lot like the Deviants from The Eternals. But the sparse story adds a little to the creatures throughout the story, ending up with something more along the lines of the fauna from Sony’s Horizon video game series.
There’s a refreshingly straightforward quality to Elevation, which establishes its core premise early on and delivers scenes of increasingly tense action and horror for the following 70 minutes. Director George Nolfi (The Adjustment Bureau) knows exactly what kind of movie this is, and wastes no time delivering the monster movie action that most audiences will have come for.
He’s aided by a pair of engaging performances from Mackie and Baccarin, who both turn thinly-sketched characters into wholly engaging leads; Baccarin, especially, keeps us invested despite having little to work with. Elevation wouldn’t work without characters we could root for, and the actors manage to create them while the script focuses on the tension.
In a year of standout horror movies that include recent releases like Longlegs, Smile 2, and Heretic, Elevation won’t be on many radars. But backed by some gorgeous location filming in the mountains of Colorado, efficient filmmaking, and standout performances, this well-executed monster movie undeniably delivers the goods, even if it doesn’t raise the bar.
