★
A boy receiving treatment for his auto-immune disorder discovers that the house he's living in isn't as safe as he thought.
Classification: 15
The only terrifying element to Netflix's latest supernatural horror is that you'll have to sit through an hour of boring jump scares alongside terrible acting and screenwriting to get to the only interesting part of the film. Eli from director Ciarán Foy sets itself up as creepy haunted house film, complete with child ghosts and creepy hospital decor but is unable to create any engaging tension for the audience. Charlie Shotwell stars as the titular Eli, a child unable to be exposed to the outside world as he will die so his parents have him committed inside a specialised quarantined medical facility. Eli's newfound freedom within this place comes at a cost as he soon begins experiencing visions and messages from other patients from beyond the grave.
Eli relies on a lot of conventional horror methods to tell its story, including jump scares, red herrings, and creepy doctors but nothing really strikes out at the audience. Eli's condition has him trapped in an environment that continuously turns against him not only through the supernatural presence but with his erratic behaviour alienating his parents and doctors. The adults believe Eli's terror stems from the radical medical treatments he must receive to be cured and Dr Horn portrayed by Lili Taylor insists that they continue despite Eli's insistence to leave. As the situation worsens, Eli becomes less trusting of his family and begins to suspect what Dr Horn's real motivations are. Even with this all going on Foy's direction creates no tangible tension or excitement, its a surface level horror consisting of spooky sounds and creepy imagery.
The intention appears to be to tap into mistrust of reality, to have the audience and Eli look at the authority figures of the film and see danger rather than security. These notions are stirred through Sadie Sink's character of Hayley, another teenager who visits Eli from the other side of the quarantined glass. Hayley tells Eli stories of the other patients, and how they also saw ghosts and that they were never cured, Sink's character is an obvious red herring and the film has a tongue in cheek joke about it but she never meshes into the story organically. It's all so Shotwell can act against an actor his own age but also for the clunky exposition to be hurled towards Eli and the audience. All of Sink's scenes operate in the same manner that they could be cut together intermittently and the audience wouldn't notice anything different.
The saving grace to Eli is in its third act where the film pulls back the curtain to reveal what strings are being pulled and by who. Oddly enough the first two halves of the film being so dull make the revelations in the final twenty minutes far more entertaining, like grading on a curve. It's where Eli actually gain some personality with its filmmaking with some new imagery and recontextualization and the plot. It doesn't undo the issues with the film but does make finishing the story less tedious as starting it. It's a shame that the script wants Eli to be as drab and unengaging as possible before it lets loose.
Even with the third act adrenaline shot, the film is not a very exciting horror film, as it has an overreliance on uneffective tropes and forgettable characters. Eli is just forgettable and inconsistent it may create some enjoyment for an audience but only artificial. That quick jolt from a creepy ghost may be enough to wake you up from your boredom but its never enough to make Eli engaging horror.
Director: #CiaránFoy
Release Date: October 18th 2019
Available exclusively on Netflix
Trailer:
Written review copyright ©CoreyBullochReviews
Images and Synopsis from the Internet Movie Database
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