content warning: violence against children, violence against women, gore, medical procedures

Eli suffers from a rare chronic illness. His family is not sure exactly what triggers it, but exposure to the outside world causes his body to react as if he’s being burned alive. They travel to the remote treatment facility of Dr. Horn who promises a cure through her own method of gene therapy. She’s retrofit an old mansion with a state of the art medical facility, though there are entire sections of the building that remain untouched. Eli becomes convinced there is someone else there, but he is the only patient being treated.

Eli is a haunted house film masked as a horror film about chronic illness. The substance of the story is driven by the treatments Eli is undergoing, but the scares are a greatest hits compilation of haunted house films in the American and Japanese styles. It’s a visual mashup of Poltergeist, Jacob’s Ladder, and The Ring. That’s not a bad thing.

The cast of the film is incredible. Charlie Shotwell commands the screen as Eli. The whole film hinges on his ability to convince you his life is threatened by the existence of the world and he succeeds. Kelly Riley and Max Martini do great work as his struggling parents. Lili Taylor is, at this point, one of our great horror actors and Dr. Horn gives her the chance to play a very different type of character. Sadie Sink rounds out the main cast as a neighborhood girl who begins visiting Eli from outside the facility, guiding him to new ideas and experiences independent of the influence of the adults who are focused on fixing him.

Director Ciarán Foy (Citadel, Sinister 2, The Wilding, the first episode of The Haunting of Hill House) knows how to put together all the pieces in horror. He’s especially good at bringing out incredibly natural performances in young actors. I did not even realize before working on this review that he was responsible for so many of these films, but the connecting elements in most of his work are explorations of terror in young people and people being haunted by the world around them.

He has a metaphor that serves him well. The process of growing up can be confusing, even scary. You start realizing all these new things about the world you never noticed before. Hauntings are often used as a metaphor for adolescence in cinema and Foy leans into the experiential learning that comes from independent exploration of the world.

Eli’s screenplay by David Chirchirillo, Ian Goldberg, and Richard Naing maybe gets a bit too clever for its own good. There is significance placed on so many tiny details that the plot can, at times, feels like it’s spinning in its wheels. This is a coming of age story about a boy with a chronic illness receiving experimental and potentially dangerous medical treatment in an abandoned mansion that may be haunted. I don’t want to spoil the film, but they pack a whole lot more into a 90 minute horror film. Let me put it this way: I checked the run time after what I swore would be the lead into the third act and only 30 minutes had passed. This is a dense horror film with a nontraditional structure and a lot of unexpected turns in the narrative.

Eli is a journey. I’ve never seen a horror film that quite does everything Eli sets out to do in one film. It’s wild and terrifying and very well executed. All the pieces don’t come together as cleanly as they could, but that’s quite rare in non-traditional horror films anyway. Horror doesn’t have to have an easy answer or even consistent logic if it succeeds in its exploration of theme and creates tension and fear. Eli is a successful horror film in that regard.

Eli is currently streaming on Netflix.

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