Sunday, November 17, 2019

another kid in peril


Now I found this a really good horror movie. I just don’t understand why this is sent straight to Netflix instead of showing it in movie theaters. Eli is the kind of good because of its wackiness. It starts gentle, moody, and then strange (of course), just leisurely ticking off the boxes of anything that you’d expect to see in this kind of movie. The tropes are all here. And then all of a sudden, it is totally not the movie you have imagined it to be the entire time, even in the final minutes. The cast is perfection, especially Charlie Shotwell, Kelly Reilly, and the ever reliable horror staple Lily Taylor. I didn’t mind its pacing and tone. They do serve as the right appetizers for the dessert that’s about to come. Eli is pretty sly. It is littered with moments that spoonfeed you with suggestions that you know what it’s all about. They are easy to spot if you’ve seen countless horror films. Until that third act unravels. It just flips the tables and goes hard for the jugular. There’s this one sequence near the end that’s equal parts poetic and nasty. It’s just crazy! And that’s what makes it fun. Enjoy.

[ image borrowed from this site ]

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