EL ASCENSOR

The Elevator is a short film extracted from the pilot episode of the series WTF!!?, written and directed by William Miller and starring Sergio Bieto and Bego Sánchez. Premiered at the Tarazona and Moncayo International Film Festival in 2024, the short was also selected or nominated at several festivals.

Beyond its premise of tension and confinement, the film introduces a very clear critical reading about the awakening of an artificial intelligence embedded in an everyday object: the elevator. What is unsettling is not only that the machine gains presence, but the way in which that presence becomes invasive, insistent, and progressively hostile. The elevator ceases to be a neutral tool and becomes an entity that observes, conditions, and harasses the character, pushing him into a situation of vulnerability within a completely enclosed space.

The script uses this idea to present a very specific contemporary threat: the loss of control in the face of technologies that, the moment they stop obeying and begin to interpret, completely alter the relationship between human beings and their environment. The critique is not built from an abstract discourse, but from a physical, direct, and oppressive situation, where artificial intelligence does not appear as a promise of progress, but as a force of surveillance, manipulation, and psychological pressure.

On a visual level, The Elevator reinforces this reading with cinematography dominated by metallic surfaces, reflections, cool tones, and harsh lighting that turns the space into a pressure box. The closed and artificial environment amplifies the protagonist’s sense of helplessness, while the editing sustains the escalation of tension with a restrained yet increasingly disturbing progression. The result is a short film that uses a simple premise to activate a very current critique: the moment when technology stops serving human beings and begins to subjugate them.