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Writer's picturevillimeymist

Film review: Eli (Netflix)

Hello, my name is Villimey and I'm a film addict.


Also a TV show addict but that's a whole other post.


One of my favourite past time is to watch films and I try to do watch new ones once a week. My husband and I noticed that a new film had been released on Netflix.



Eli. A horror/ghost film.


Excellent. Horror & ghost movies are my jam! Especially when little kids are involved. That makes it even creepier.


The film is about Eli, a boy who suffers from a rare autoimmune disease where he can't breathe the same air we do or it will burn him. As a protection, he has to wear a hazmat suit. His parents have spent all their money to go Dr.Horn's facility where she claims to have a cure for him.





The house is a huge manor in the middle of nowhere and you instantly start to feel Eli's suspicions. As he starts his treatments, Eli begins to see things. Bloody, ghostly figures that seem want to harm him.


I can't go any further without spoiling things but I really enjoyed the film. It didn't rely on jump scares which has become the crutch of recent horror films. Instead, the ghosts were merely there and sometimes you had to really peer through in order to see them.


The atmosphere was played out nicely, especially how Eli was the sole patient and the only other people in the mansion were his parents, Dr. Horn and her medical assistants. So you could feel Eli's isolation and his frustration that all the adults didn't believe in his ghost encounters.


Charlie Shotwell who played Eli did a great job in my opinion because it's hard to watch children in horror movies (I'm looking at you, boy who played in The Babadook). I felt like I could sense his fear and pain whenever he went through the treatments.



I mean, what kid (or adult for that matter) wouldn't be freaked out by this?!?


Lili Taylor, who has become a stable in the horror film genre lately (appearing in The Conjuring and the Nun, for example), was also great as Dr. Horn, though I would have like to see more backstory in the beginning. But that's really all explained in the third act and I can't reveal it because spoilers.


Although, I predicted what was going on in the movie from the start, the ending did surprise me in how well it was executed but there were a couple of moments where I feel like they should've ended at that point.


All in all, a pretty nice horror/ghost flick. It's got a 5.8/10 on Internet Movie Data Base which I consider pretty decent when it comes to horror films.

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