Eli (2019) - Movie Review

I don’t like getting into spoilers in these reviews. Oh sure, if a film’s ending is particularly noteworthy (usually for how bad it is) and it bends my entire understanding of the film as it unfolds, it becomes somewhat of a necessity to delve into it in order to give my full perspective. But otherwise, much like how I don’t like even indirectly insulting people who like films that I personally don’t, I don’t like the idea of taking away the chance for someone else to experience a well-constructed twist in a work of fiction. But we’ve reached another one of those times where, for reasons I’ll get into, I have to get into this film’s conclusion in order to properly explain just how… baffling this thing is.

Let’s look at the basic mechanics of the narrative first. We follow the titular Eli (played adequately by Charlie Shotwell), a child with an unnamed immunity disorder, as he goes under an experimental treatment that could potentially make him well again. It’s psycho-horror that does what all the good efforts in the genre do, actively fuck with the audience’s perception of reality within the film itself, but the attempts made here are far too obvious to be effective.

Not only is it painfully obvious early on that things aren’t on the up-and-up at Dr. Isabella Horn’s facility, even for a story setup that almost always makes that clear from the off, the ways that the actual horror presents itself are almost laughably lame. If it isn’t Eli having mild variations on the exact same dream every few minutes, it’s using ghosts for cheap jump scares where the only positive is that at least composer Bear McCreary didn’t go for tacky dramatic stings every time they occur.

That sense of the blindly obvious, and everyone save for McCreary underestimating the audience’s intelligence, carries into the plot proper as well. Throughout the film, right from a literal billboard carrying a Biblical quote that basically spells out the shadiness of what’s to follow, there are near-constant mentions of lying. While some of it is admittedly subtle, like it how it manifests differently in the dialogue of Eli’s parents, it largely amounts to just shoving the word ‘lie’ at the camera lens over and over again. It’s a leitmotif so lacking in nuance, you’d think Gregg Araki wrote it, but it admittedly does set up a reveal that shows just how much Eli has been gaslighted throughout the film.

However, what we actually get doesn’t manage to make the slothful attempts at horror feel like appropriate build-up for it. We do get a twist, but it’s the kind that thinks being unpredictable is all it takes to be effective. It’s so out of left field, so jarringly more interesting than everything preceding it (for what little we actually get out of it), that part of me wants to recommend the film for the ending alone.

Except I’ve seen this kind of ending before, this calamitous conclusion that, while quite wild and explosive in its presentation, brings all of the film’s biggest ideas together. The Cabin In The Woods had this kind of ending. mother! had this kind of ending. Even Chappie, another middling film where the ending is the most interesting part, had this kind of ending.

But where all of those films actually earned that monstrous head of steam for its finale (even Chappie, as wonky as it was across the board), this film simply doesn’t. Whatever setup exists in this film could just as easily have led into any number of different conclusions and it would be about as fulfilling as what we actually get here. There is some cheap catharsis to be gotten out of it, mainly when the film actually gets around to punishing its false witnesses, but nothing that makes this film as a whole feel like anything more than a malformed attempt to turn Everything, Everything into a Supernatural episode.