When I first saw the thumbnail image for Eli on Netflix, I thought one thing. When I first watched the trailer for it, I thought another. When I watched it for myself, I had many thoughts, and not all of them were positive. This will be a somewhat vague review because spoilers are a big thing about this movie and I’d rather not ruin the experience for anyone else who might find enjoyment in a movie like Eli.

I, for one, did not enjoy it. However, the big reveal at the end shows that there was a great deal of ambition to the story the filmmakers were trying to tell with Eli. It’s certainly a new take on a tired sub-genre of horror that has been done over, and over, and over. So I admire the moxie and the impressive goal that everyone was shooting for with this one.

Perhaps it’s just that I watched it recently and it’s still on my mind, but I couldn’t help noting Eli was something like the polar opposite of Us. Us had a talented cast, with great execution, direction, cinematography, and so on, but the plot didn’t make sense and the movie got worse as it got closer to the end. Eli, on the other hand, got better towards the conclusion because the plot is the most interesting part (at the end, at least), while the acting, dialogue, pacing, etc., is awful. Which movie is better? Us. Which movie had a more interesting story? Probably still Us. Which movie would I want to watch again? Neither, but we’re taking a look at Eli today, so before I digress any further…

Pros

Ending reveals that there were some interesting ideas
Climax is a special effects event
Some creepy moments earlier in the film that kind of work, aside from the cheap-looking CGI
Lili Taylor is good at playing a nurturing character you can’t quite trust
Less than two hours long

Cons

Characters are annoying or unsympathetic
Some really bad or over-the-top acting from the children and the mom
Dialogue is really poor in some spots, leading to arbitrary conflicts and arguments
Plot still doesn’t work if you think about it too much
Pacing is really poor; every scary scene is like a climax
Not enough hints are given throughout the first two acts for the big reveal at the end to be that satisfying

Plot & Thoughts

A young boy named Eli (Charlie Shotwell) has an immune system disorder which causes him a great deal of pain and discomfort when he is exposed to the outside world. He has to stay in a sterile environment and wear a hazmat suit when he goes outside. In an attempt to cure him of his ailments, his mom, Rose (Kelly Reilly), and dad, Paul (Max Martini), go on a road trip to bring him to a specialist, Dr. Horn (Lili Taylor). Dr. Horn has retrofitted an old house to help treat children with his condition. Before they get there, there are a few unbelievable interactions the family has with some irrelevant individuals, but the movie wastes little time in getting them to the primary setting. And wouldn’t you know it, within five minutes of being in this facility, Eli sees a young spooky girl in white, slowly backing away down a dimly lit hallway. Even though Dr. Horn has a strong track record with dealing with children like Eli, the lack of other patients in the facility and her shifty ways of dodging questions make Eli wonder if she’s really trying to cure him.

When you see that one of the pros of the movie is that it’s “less than two hours long,” it either means that I’m simply pleased the filmmakers were so efficient in their filming and editing processes that they were able to craft something that wasn’t too tedious to watch, OR it means that I’m glad it didn’t take forever to end. In Eli’s case, it’s the latter. Though, the speed at which this film moves is probably part of what makes it so bad. Eli has some big ideas, some of which are interesting, or new, at the very least. The filmmakers must have thought so too because it seems like if there was an option to cut something for the sake of having more time to do another thing well, the decision was just to cram it all in and still keep it short, somehow. Unfortunately, this results in too many horror sequences that start off spooky or creepy and then escalate to a high intensity to end the scene faster.

Once Eli is left alone in his own room, every ghostly interaction gets wild and bombastic. Rather than letting the creepiness linger in the quiet, letting our own imagination ride the slowly rising tension of a scene in which nothing is happening, the movie would rather just have the ghost leap out and attack Eli after some spooky shenanigans. It’s a real shame too because in almost every one of these interactions, it does something in a way that is creatively creepy, even if a bit cliche. Something like ghost breath appearing on the window, or a shape in some curtains, or a weirdly contorted body that is disguised in the background as a piece of furniture suddenly coming to life, are some of the examples that pop into my head of the creepy moments that start off well. Had the movie simply done these bits and then moved on to the next scene, or just kept the creepiness going for a longer period of time, rather than having the ghost attack the boy or drag him all over the place, Eli would have been legitimately creepy. Instead, the tension that was built is immediately released by the ghost attack. For an example of how to do this right, see how The Conjuring slowly ratchets up the tension in each scene, with some scenes having “nothing happen” at all, keeping it from being predictable and choosing only the right moments to go all out.

When it comes to the characters, I find them difficult to sympathize with due to poor dialogue, over-acting, or just plain dullness. Eli is screaming through half the movie, either because of a tantrum about how no one believes him about the ghosts, or because the ghosts are attacking him again. His mother, Rose, constantly has a dopey expression on her face in her attempts at sympathy and love and comes across as an incompetent helicopter parent. Max Martini and Lili Taylor as Eli’s Dad and Dr. Horn do a more commendable job of acting with more subtlety and nuance, making them the only characters I barely cared about. Then there’s the character of Haley (Sadie Sink), a mysterious young girl who shows up outside the facility and talks to Eli through the glass. Apparently, she’s been a problem in the past with previous patients—no one ever bothers to lock Eli in his room to keep him from interacting with mysterious girls, despite his ravings of madness, but that’s not the point. When Eli talks to this girl, the dialogue that Sadie Sink very poorly delivers is trash and every scene with this character is a miserable experience. It’s not quite on par with the performance of a particular young boy in a George Lucas movie, but it’s nowhere close to good either.

The ending, I admittedly did not see coming until I was knee-deep in the last act of the movie. It simultaneously managed to make me more intrigued and disappointed. There are moments throughout the movie that you can call “hints,” once you’ve seen the ending. However, none of those “hints” in the first few acts give you any insight or meaning in a way that would actually inform you that Eli is not just a ghost story or a different take on another horror sub-genre. The movie only starts to give out hints with substance towards the end, and by then, I didn’t really care much. The climax kicks up the special effects and drama, but it still involves some very dumb behavior from some of the characters and leads to an ultimately dissatisfying conclusion. It’s as though, for every positive trait of Eli that I struggled to come up with, I could more easily recall two or three things that I didn’t like to counter that positive. This movie isn’t half-good. It’s barely a third good because it was so frustrating to watch good ideas be wasted by poor execution.

TL;DR (Conclusion)

Eli is a horror film that is in a rush. It wants to get to the point where it can surprise you with its ending and effectively change what the movie is all about. However, having big ideas and ambitions does not make a good movie and, in Eli’s rush to get to the “good stuff,” we end up with a great deal of wasted potential instead. Boring characters, bad dialogue, amateurish acting, and misguided direction plague this movie with only a few interesting ideas and some creepy moments to make up for it. Eli is watchable, but if you have nothing better to do for the next 98 minutes, you should probably still do something else.

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