We open with a picturesque scene: a family picnicking on a beautiful day. A towheaded boy walks toward his parents, smiling in the sunshine, when he suddenly falls to the ground, his skin flushing crimson. “It burns! It burns!”
Eli (Charlie Shotwell) wakes in his bed. He suffers from an autoimmune disease that essentially means he’s “allergic to the world.” He lives in a plastic tent in his own home; when he travels outside, he must wear a quarantine suit. But his parents Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Paul (Max Martini) believe they have found a solution for their son’s condition: a series of experimental procedures that take place in a “clean house” operated by Dr. Isabella Horn (the great Lili Taylor).
When the family arrives at Dr. Horn’s facility, a creeping old mansion retrofitted into a giant quarantine chamber, it seems like the enormous amount of money they’ve sunk into this endeavor was well spent. Eli can walk around the halls of the clean house in normal clothes, and he can shower and touch his mother’s hand for the first time in years. But as the procedures grow increasingly painful and Eli begins to see apparitions around every doorway, it becomes clear that Dr. Horn’s solution is the beginning of a whole bunch of new problems.
Aside from that intriguing autoimmune disease angle, Eli, from Sinister 2’s Ciarán Foy, starts out as a pretty generic haunted house thriller. Eli’s ghosts are burned-face, red-eyed little CGI ghouls that show up in shadowy doorways and mirror reflections, leaving notes in breath-fog on the window, making the pretty no-duh connection that “ELI” can be scrambled to also spell “LIE.” The jump-scares are somewhat effective but a little well-worn, and they quickly become repetitive. For at least the first half of the film, Eli doesn’t appear to have anything new to show us in the horror department.
But the script is twisty, and we begin to suspect there’s more to this film than “the ghosts of dead patients haunt a facility run by a doctor who should have long ago been served with a malpractice suit.” Eli keeps getting visits through a glass door by a plucky young neighbor played by Stranger Things’ Sadie Sink, and she tells him not to trust Dr. Horn, that she’s “shifty.” The doctor is indeed shifty, and Taylor is such great casting in the role, with her vague, gentle, not-quite-rightness. You both trust her and wonder what the hell she’s thinking about every time she’s onscreen. Reilly and Martini are both pretty good as the parents, too, but Shotwell’s fantastic as Eli, delivering very convincing terror and fury as needed. He’s got a future as a scream kid if he wants it.
So yeah, there’s a whole wackadoo plot angle that we won’t get into here for spoiler reasons, but trust me to say that it turns out Eli isn’t your generic haunted house thriller. Sadly, even when David Chirchirillo, Ian Goldberg and Richard Naing’s script (which was on The Black List) is delivering surprises and turns, the film remains a little corny and, well, affordable-looking, but it grows so goofy and out there that, by the end, Eli had won me over. We see so many glossy, commercial haunted house movies, and while Eli both looks and often feels like one, it does something those movies rarely do, which is catch us entirely off-guard by the end. Eli goes to some admirably nuts places, and I’m always here for a ridiculous final act, even if it follows a few rather trite first few acts.
Eli doesn’t always work, and you’ll spend a lot of the first half rolling your eyes, but after those last ten minutes, you definitely won’t be sorry you watched it. It hits Netflix this week, so you can decide for yourself soon enough.
