Eli (2019)

Movie: Eli (2019), directed by Ciarán Foy

Watched on: Netflix

Ran: 7.14 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:05:44 (recovery run)

 

You guys. You guys. It is FANTASTIC living under my rock! Seriously, I get to see so many movies while knowing absolutely nothing whatsoever about them, and every once in a while that blissful ignorance really pays off. Tonight, for example, I left my nightly run ’til pretty late, so I was hard-pressed to pick a movie quickly enough to finish my seven miles by midnight. Since it had been literally weeks since I’d run to anything on Netflix, I was scrolling through the Horror section during my warm-up walk and finally settled on Eli. I knew nothing about Eli.

 

I know, crazy, right? Because as soon as I finished my run I immediately started poking around online, and it was obvious that EVERYBODY has known about Eli for over a year now. Which means everybody knew it had a twist ending, and everybody also knew that said twist ending was highly polarizing, and either the thing that ruined an otherwise terrific movie or the best thing since someone figured out you could use something called a “knife” on bread instead of just stuffing the entire loaf down one’s aching gullet. I number myself among the latter. If fact, I go further than that, because Eli contains several twists along with The Big One, and I think they’re all pretty keen.

 

Eli, as if your non-beneath-rock-dwelling self didn’t know, is about a boy with an autoimmune disorder that requires him to live in plastic bubbles and makeshift hazmat suits. Venturing outside without protection from irritants triggers immediate skin rashes and respiratory distress that would kill him. As a last-ditch effort to give Eli a normal life, his parents drive him to a special “clean house” medical facility, where a Dr. Horn reportedly has a 100% cure rate performing groundbreaking gene therapy on people with Eli’s condition. Life is rough for Eli right off the bat; his gene therapy treatments are super-painful, and the medication he’s on can cause nightmares and hallucinations—which means that all the oh-I-don’t-know GHOSTS he keeps seeing are laughed off by the grown-ups as just an unfortunate side-effect.  

 

Luckily, he’s befriended a local girl, Haley, who chucks pebbles at his windows in the night so he can come downstairs and speak to her through the glass of a big ol’ window. Haley believes Eli about the ghosts, and also notes that she’s spoken to other kids who have been patients there—they, too, saw ghosts, and none of them ever came out cured. Now Eli’s initial suspicions of Dr. Horn’s motives are amped to 11, and meanwhile, the ghosts have started messing with him in increasingly intrusive ways, culminating in dragging him down the halls and trying to throw him out of the house unprotected. However, he’s also figured out that they had been trying to give him the code to Dr. Horn’s medical records room. Are they trying to hurt him, or help him?

 

Therein lies the effectiveness of the multiple twists in Eli: they’re all about trust and whether it’s misplaced. Eli is a child, and an immunocompromised one at that; he is the poster child of helplessness. The horror he faces is that the people he relies on may not have his best interests at heart. This plays out throughout the film with his parents, each of whom he has reason to suspect of falsehood and betrayal on multiple different occasions. There’s a constant whipsawing of loyalties as every single entity in Eli’s world, corporeal or not, might be on his side or might be out to get him. Heck, with all the drugs he’s taking, he can’t even trust his own judgment… but by the time “the” twist comes around, Eli’s going to have to rely on his own power to escape with his life. I wish I could say more, but the less you know when you see this, the better. Just, y’know… trust me.

 

Eli isn’t a perfect film, even if you like the hard left turn it makes near the end, like I do. There are a lot of… well, I wouldn’t call them plot holes, exactly, but more like unlikely conveniences without which the plot can’t function. For instance, most kids who have had just had bone punches in their hips or invasive skull surgery aren’t going to be running around sprightly and free to fight rambunctious ghosts and play Hardy Boys. This comes down to a writing issue, I think—Eli’s treatment could just have easily been something far less invasive, but they wanted the medical horror on top of the ghost story AND the kid-beset-from-all-sides angle, and everything is a little bit weaker as a consequence. Still, I find the film's shortcomings pretty minor in light of its overall effect.

 

If you’re not a fan of surprises or genre crossovers, you’d probably do well to give Eli a miss. If you like horror that isn’t afraid to break the rules, I think you’ll find a lot to like, including the fact that Haley is played by the zoomer from Stranger Things. Enjoy!