Netflix keeps recommending Eli (2019), and we finally watched it. Now, we're reviewing it. Warning: SPOILERS.
Eli suffers from a mysterious illness that forces him to live isolated from the outside world. His parents, Rose and Paul, believe they finally found a cure in Dr Horn's research. The family travels to her isolated clinic, where Eli is the only patient. At first, he's happy, but then the haunting starts...
Eli lives in a protective bubble in his own home, and must put on a hazmat suit to leave its safe environment. When part of the suit is torn, he freaks out and his skin gets covered in aggressive rashes, almost as if it were burning from within. His mother manages to calm him down and Eli's skin goes back to normal. This doesn't quite feel like a normal illness from the start, and the weird, spooky clinic where the treatment will take place doesn't look like a normal clinic, either. It's one of those obviously haunted places that anyone with any sense of self-preservation would avoid, but Eli and his parents are desperate. The only staff is Dr Horn and her 2 nurses, Barbara and Maricela, and the treatment everyone hopes will help Eli consists of a virus that will reset his immune system and involves pain and drilling. The emptiness of the building and Dr Horn's evasiveness when Eli asks about her success rate make it clear that bad things have (and probably still are) happening there. Still, they're desperate and Eli doesn't even need to wear his hazmat suit in the house, which means a lot more freedom and the ability to hug his parents for the first time in years.
The haunting starts slowly, with someone's breath on the window, and spooky noises, but suddenly Eli is seeing a contortionist ghost girl and being tossed around with his closet where someone carved what appears to be "Lie". The ghosts appearing and disappearing with the light reminded us of Lights Out (2016) and was a pretty effective way to generate some jump scares. No one believes Eli and Dr Horn says they're just hallucinations, which is a possible side effect of the medication. He doesn't believe her and Haley, a girl he saw on his way there and goes to the clinic to talk, makes his suspicions worse by telling him the previous patient, Perry, also saw the ghosts. Oh, and that he disappeared after the third round of treatment. Unfortunately, Eli's parents aren't too happy with his request to leave before completing the treatment, especially Paul, as they might not have another chance and spent all their money on this. However, the ghosts turn out to have been trying to help, and the carvings on the closet door is actually a number and the access code to the medical room. Eli goes there to find out what the hell is going on and predictably finds the previous patients' files with gruesome photos of them dead after round 3. Not so predictable is what's in Dr Horn's room, where he locks himself after being caught snooping. First, Eli sees a group photo of her and the nurses, dressed as nuns, surrounded by other nuns. Then, he opens a door to a hidden passage that leads to an altar with crucifixes, and things take a turn for the crazy. We didn't know much about this movie, and the skin burning made us wonder if Eli wasn't going to end up being a vampire; we were definitely not expecting what happened next.
Eli is found by Paul and Dr Horn, and they... lock him in the altar cave. He freaks out and his skin gets covered in rashes again, but he doesn't die. Rose thinks she can reason with him, and finally tells him the truth - there's no illness and they lied so they could protect him from the world, though as we will soon see, it's probably the world that needs protecting from Eli. He knocks her out and makes one last attempt at getting the hell out of there, but is caught by his father, who drugs him, and ends up restrained in the medical room, where Dr Horn and the nurses are ready for the final round of treatment. After she finds the bodies of the previous patients hidden in the altar cave, Rose takes a knife she found inside one of the crucifixes and tries to stop them, but Paul doesn't believe in a cure anymore; the only thing Dr Horn can do now is to save Eli's soul. And how will she do that? By performing a sort of exorcism where she recites the Bible in Latin and throws holy water at Eli before killing him with the knife Rose found. Except Eli is too strong now and manages to free himself. He first makes Dr Horn stab herself and then she and the nurses end up hanging upside down in a cruciform position, floating around the room. This looked a little ridiculous, until he set them on fire. Rose, who wears a cross and was previously shown praying, confesses that she was so desperate for a son that she accepted the Devil's offer and Eli was born. Was adoption not an option? Because that seems safer than boinking Satan. After exploding Paul's face, Eli walks out of the clinic, setting it on fire with each step. Waiting outside is Haley, who, like the previous patients, is his half-sibling on their father's side, and now wants to take Eli to meet him. Rose wants to go with them and as she tries to start the car, it's time for Eli to calm her down in a clunky callback to the scene where he freaks out about the torn suit. And that's it. Sadly there's no sequel, so we won't get to see their family reunion. While we liked the twist, the revelation about Eli's true nature made Dr Horn and the nurses look like idiots. They didn't notice Haley throwing pebbles at Eli's window? Considering that she had talked to the previous patients, they should've known she'd come back. Then there's the fact that Eli managed to walk around the building at night more than once. Shouldn't they have been more careful? Were there no cameras anywhere? And if Dr Horn is performing exorcisms, why didn't she do anything about the ghosts? Or did she really think it was all side effects from the treatment? They were way too careless for people handling Devil's children. Some of the ghosts' actions made little sense, too. Why were they so aggressive, and why were they acting like scary ghosts? Sure, it gave the audience some scary moments, but there was no reason for that.
VERDICT
Eli (2019) was a nice surprise. We weren't expecting much from this, and liked how it went crazy in the end. It also had some spooky moments, though it's a shame that there weren't more people at the sinister clinic to increase the body count in the end. Still, despite its issues, it was enjoyable.