Premise: A bubble boy goes to a secluded facility to get a treatment to cure his disease, but he suspects that something more nefarious is going on there.
With a lot of horror, the less you know the better, so if you are reading this to decide whether or not you should watch Eli: you should. That's my stance. It's good. It's short. Best of all, it knows that you've seen a horror movie before. You should probably stop here.
The best think about Eli is that I thought it was pretty bad for the first hour. It was recommended to me by a friend, and I was really starting to question his judgment. That hour is filled with repeated horror movie cliche's about haunted houses, vague religious undertones, and a protagonist who no one believes. Maybe if I was a different kind of viewer, I would've been looking for a twist harder. I know something would be revealed by the end, but I figured it would be an expected twist, if you know what I mean. I was 100% not expecting this to be a covert exorcism movie. Bravo. They hid that pretty well. They foregrounded it well too. The movie was smart about it. They put the religion in there but quietly. They got me looking one way with the haunted house, the extreme rare disease, the secrecy of the compound, and the trope about no one believing the protagonist. I didn't expect them to add another layer at the end. The only real indication I had that something was going down was that it burned through more of the plot than normal with 30 minutes still left. I was really pleased with this movie despite the imperfections.
Yes, it did have a few quirks that bothered me. It never made sense how accessible Sadie Sink's character was in an otherwise locked-down facility. That first hour does drag until the good twists start. A few of the events that happen to fill the time don't make a lot of sense. Like, what's up with the scene where he knocks over the dresser? This is definitely a movie where the payoff makes up for the investment though.
Verdict: Strongly Recommend
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