Eli's twist ending doesn't make any sense
Netflix has been saturating its streaming service with horror, and Eli is the latest in a long line. From In The Tall Grass to Wounds, if you're a fan of horror you've come to the right place.
Eli was bought by Netflix from Paramount and stars Charlie Shotwell as the eponymous boy, with Kelly Reilly and Max Martini as his parents Rose and Paul. Lili Taylor plays the doctor who promises a cure for Eli's mysterious all-consuming allergies.
Be warned: there are massive spoilers ahead for Eli.
To sum up the ending, Eli's mystery illness turns out to be down to the fact that he's the son of Satan. Yep.
Rose was so desperate to get pregnant that when God didn't answer her prayers, she turned to Satan. Instead of, you know, IVF or adoption. But, anyway. The devil lied and promised her that her son would be normal, not a demonic mini-Satan.
On the face of it, the twist makes sense, sort of. For the last four years, Rose has been giving him 'meds' for his illness, which were actually tannis root and holy water to ward off his devilish traits.
But by the age of ten Eli's diabolic nature was becoming too powerful, so Rose found Dr Isabella Horn, who runs a 'clean house' where Eli will purportedly receive three rounds of an experimental treatment to cure his allergies.
But Dr Horn isn't a doctor – at least there's no evidence of that – and is instead a nun who plans to do a three-stage exorcism of sorts, which ends in Eli's death via holy water and a sacrificial stabbing, which, yes, would kill the devil but also kill Eli.
So this is the crux of the problem. In the beginning, we're led to believe it's Rose who found "Dr" Horn and forced Paul to agree to spend literally all their money on the 'treatment'. Paul, on the other hand, seems less than convinced by the whole thing. So does he know Eli's the antichrist or not?
As Eli's concerns grow about his treatment because he's seeing ghosts, it is Paul and Dr Horn who are whispering in the hallway about Eli's final 'treatment' – aka his death. And Rose is wholly in the dark.
She even confronts Paul, saying "you told me Dr Horn cured all her patients" when in reality she's cured no one, just killed them all (the devil gets around).
So what the hell is going on? The 'twist' that Eli is the son of the devil is fine, but the whole 'cured by death' thing makes no sense. At what point did Rose stop investigating Dr Horn? And when did Paul take over? How did we even get here?
Rose is the one who knows best what her son will grow into but goes from being the one most dedicated to saving his soul to the one who somehow thinks she'll be able to manage it on her own without the whole exorcism thing. That makes sense if you assume she didn't know about "stage three" and gets cold feet. But what about Paul?
And we haven't even mentioned the brief moments where Eli is exposed to the outside world and he breaks out in hives and stops breathing, while another one of the devil's children (Hayley, played by Stranger Things' Sadie Sink) hangs out without a hazmat suit and is totally fine.
So is it that you have to fully accept your place as the Devil's child in order to survive in the real world? Or is it like a cocooning process – you have to make it through the burning hives to emerge fully Satanic?
Chalk it up to fridge logic.
Eli is now available to stream on Netflix
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