Eli (2019)

Warning: I’m going to spoil the devil out of the final act twist!

Rose (Kelly Reilly) and Paul (Max Martini) have clearly grown desperate about the rather peculiar auto-immune disease of their little son Eli (Charlie Shotwell). That at least seems to be the only rational explanation for their decision to pack him, his little bubble boy tent and his little hazmat suit, and take him to the very special clinic of what we can only assume (because the film certainly isn’t saying) to be rogue immunologist Dr Horn (Lili Taylor). “Rogue”, because what proper clinic would be an old creepy mansion out in the boons, staffed only by the doctor and two nurses and only ever keeping one patient at a time. Once the treatments start and Eli looks increasingly worse for wear, one also can’t help but ask oneself if one shouldn’t replace the “rogue immunologist” simply with “mad scientist”.

When he’s not getting tortured by the good doctor, Eli does encounter various strangenesses. For one there’s the sarcastic girl (Sadie Sink overacting for all she is worth) outside he has regular chats with through a closed terrace door, and who seems to hint at something not being quite right at the clinic. Worse than mockery, however, are the ghosts. At first, Eli believes these entities want to do him harm, but as he will eventually discover, they are the spirits of Horn’s former patients, all deceased thanks to her treatments, attempting to warn him and help him escape.

The problem is that his parents are more or less in on the dangers of the whole affair – his dad more so than his mum – but then, and here comes the plot twist, Eli is  not actually there to be treated for an auto-immune disease, but because he’s a son of the devil. I’m not speaking metaphorically here, mumsy really banged the devil. Of course, “Doctor” Horn and her nurses aren’t medical people either, but what I can only assume to be renegade nuns – child murder not generally being a terribly accepted part of Christian doctrine – pumping him full of Holy Water in the hopes that it cures him or kills him and saves his soul.

When Eli figures this nonsense out, he gets a bit angry, so I hope you like the idea of a hilarious/dramatic confrontation between mother and son that’s surrounded by a little circle of floating, upside-down (because SATAN) crucified nuns who will of course eventually catch fire.

Now, if you’re asking yourself if Ciaran Foy’s Made-for-Netflix horror movie really is quite as stupid as all of this sounds, I can assure you that yes, it indeed is. On a technical level, Foy is a perfectly capable director, but he is not able (or not willing) to turn the film into the sort of dream-like phantasmagoria needed to make a plot quite this dumb and contrived work. Instead, much of the film is spent on the usual contemporary mainstream horror business of jump scares and people creeping through badly lit corridors.

The film’s structure doesn’t help make up for its dubious big idea either, for the reliance on the one big twist does mean that everything that comes before looks and feels terribly implausible. Neither Eli’s illness, nor the way his parents treat him, nor Horn’s therapy make sense as anything but either a writerly inability to understand the basics of reality or the long, long wind-up to a Big Twist. Alas not in any way that might intrigue a viewer; it’s rather like having to listen to a storyteller who never comes to the frigging point, instead dragging things out endlessly.


Of course, once the point came, I did find myself surprised by its extravagant stupidity as well as by the filmmakers’ apparent conviction that this nonsense somehow makes up for their film feeling patently ridiculous throughout. Foy, despite a soundtrack that becomes increasingly (one might say desperately) dramatic and actors giving their all melodramatically pulling their hair out, simply can’t sell any of it, playing as highly shocking and horrifying what actually comes out schlocky and intensely hilarious.

In short: The Conjuring (2013)

It's 1971. Carolyn Perron (Lily Taylor, putting her considerable talent to dubious yet effective use), her husband Roger (Ron Livingston) and their truckload of children have put all their money - which isn't much - into buying a beautiful house out in the middle nowhere. Unfortunately, as soon as the family has moved into its new dream home, Weird Shit™ begins to happen. Frequent horror movie goers will at once identify their troubles as sure signs of Demonic Infestation™.

When weird turns dangerous, the Perrons ask demonologist couple Lorraine (Vera Farmiga) and Ed Warren (Patrick Wilson) for help. The diagnosis isn't promising, because the family's troubles are the worst case of Evil™ the Warrens have encountered in their career until then and it'll take all of their resolve to get rid of the unwanted entities.

While I wasn't looking, James Wan turned into quite a horror director. Sure, he still wouldn't recognize subtlety it fell on his head, but he has obviously learned to use loud and garish, even more loud and garish, and incredibly loud and garish so well, his The Conjuring is something of a fun time, if a very empty one. In particular, Wan has now learned to use jump scares in a manner that doesn't induce eye-rolling and loud sighing from me, seeing as he mostly uses them as pay-offs for long and surprisingly effective suspense scenes.

One could argue that a really good director would probably just keep the suspense scenes and get rid of the jump scares completely but that would be too subtle for The Conjuring. For where Wan's efforts are hitting the mark, the script by Chad and Carey Hayes is the sort of concoction I expected (before I read other reviews online) even the mildest of viewers would have a hard time not to describe as outrageously stupid or just plain idiotic. There's really not a single thought to be found in the film beyond "demons bad", "family good", "Jesus awesome", "buy the books of Ed and Lorraine". For most of the time, the script tries to distract from that absence of anything, and from its manifold plotting troubles (just look how plain stupid the Warrens repeatedly act, despite having their own museum of haunted artefacts, and oh so much experience), by throwing one shouty, hopefully creepy set piece after the next at its audience. Thanks to Wan, this distraction manoeuvre is quite effective, though the film never reaches the point of transcendent stupidity, that is to say, the point where stupid turns into awe-inspiringly strange, nor the point where I stopped caring about the stupidity going on.

The Conjuring is always at its weakest when it feels the need to work as an advert for the real-life Warrens and their "demonology" bullshit, really not giving the on-screen couple any mentionable flaws beyond their stupidity, whose existence the film doesn't even seem to realize, and not putting a single thought into what it would actually mean to live in a world as haunted by the supernatural as it and the Warrens argue it is. But then, that would lead to a film that actually has something interesting to say, and we can't have that, now can we?

Still, as far as intellectually and emotionally empty experiences that try to distract from their failings by copious amounts of - real and metaphorical - shouting go, The Conjuring is pretty awesome.

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