Eli (horror film) : A few good jump scares but mostly kinda boring / annoying

The search goes on for a newish horror film and to be fair to Eli i went into this movie halfway expecting to not like it since generally speaking I am not a fan of child actors, particularly not those in the lead.

The film is very vague in its description and I will do the same when writing about it here. As always, i have tried to steer clear of spoilers but there is always a chance that I might slip up. If you want to see this film "blind" it's probably better to just skip this write-up

Basically Eli is a story about a young boy who has an extremely rare disease that causes him to have severe allergic reactions to just about everything. He cannot be exposed to normal air or water and therefore must spend all of his days living inside of a bubble tent that completely isolates him from the outside world.

His parents have discovered a doctor that has success at curing his disease and the in the first 10 minutes of the film he is transported to the remote facility.

Upon arriving at the rather spooky looking medical facilities and Eli starts seeing things that no one else can. This is where some of the very interesting cinematography and direction choices result in some pretty cool jump scares. Unfortunately, the rest of the story is pretty slow-moving, boring, and to be totally honest impractical, even for a supernatural horror film.

Without being too specific, the things that Eli discovers normally occur in a rather noisy fashion, yet no one comes to his aid even though he is obviously the center of attention at this facility. It has already been well established that the entire facility is closely monitored which makes this sort of very noisy stuff that no one notices a bit dumb. Also, when these things continually happen to Eli and still no one monitors the little dude, it just becomes really impractical.

I think the thing that annoyed me the most is that Eli (Charlie Shotwell) spends a great deal of the film shouting and it starts to grind at my nerves when any actor does this. Granted Shotwell is new to the game and I tend to not care for child actors anyway, but there isn't much of a story here except Eli doing a bunch of shouting for at least half of the film. It must have been exhausting filming that.

The film had an $11 million budget and that is easy to see because the effects that are in the movie are few and far between but are actually extremely well-done. However, since there isn't really much of a story here, there is an absolute ton of just.... junk... that takes place between the maybe half a dozen "fun parts" of the film (some of which i was actually scared to look at the screen.)

Overall, the slow pacing and obvious filler-to-make-this-short-story-90-minutes-long is the death of this movie, and I can't really recommend it aside from a few scenes and for most movie fans, this simply isn't enough.