“Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Hotel Cecil“ is better than expected, but has still been met with mixed reviews.
I was skeptical coming into this true crime documentary. I wasn’t sure that it was going to be good. When the trailers came out, it seemed the film would try and link the hotel to the supernatural, something that I was not on board for.
However, the documentary surprised me pleasantly. Although it appeared to be just about the Hotel Cecil at first, the film quickly focused on talking about the disappearance of Elisa Lam.
The cops had released the video of her last moments in the elevator to the press, and it went viral. Internet sleuths began breaking down every second of the video. Many of them searched through her Tumblr posts getting to know her and trying to understand what had happened.
While all of this is interesting, Netflix fails because they created a four part story that should have been an hour and half documentary. The story is dragged out to the point of making it hard to follow what this documentary is about: true justice.
“It’s a shame that it takes so long for the show to understand what makes this particular crime scene compelling — or, even worse, that it relishes validating the most salacious details and theories before deigning to do its case, and the woman at its center, true justice,” said Variety.
Elisa Lam was a victim of Hotel Cecil. In the sense that, Hotel Cecil was right by Skid Row, a place where Los Angeles decided to contain all of it’s problems, making it a dangerous place. Because of its location, Hotel Cecil became a dumping ground for desperate people to stay. What happens when you put all of these people together? Violence ensues.
The best part of the documentary was the focus on the police investigation. Throughout, the officers were the most logical interviewees as they lay out the facts of the case. Everyone else is emotionally attached to the case and it makes it hard to see if they are really a reliable source.
Her story ends in tragedy though, as she was not murdered. Her death was accidental. Elisa Lam had stopped taking her medication for bipolar disorder, and she had an episode where she believed herself to be in danger. In trying to escape, she dropped into the water tank and couldn’t get out.
The story itself is about how the system has failed, and a tragic ending that the viewer wants someone to blame for. The internet sleuths portray this. After obsessing over what happened to Elisa Lam, and accusing an innocent man of killing her, the internet was infuriated when her death was ruled as an accident.
The media had blown this story up and many people felt attached to Elisa Lam herself through reading the Tumblr blog that she wrote about. The documentary slowly portrays how the internet comes to accept what happened. This is shown through how the family knew that she had a history of not taking her medication and that could have caused an issue. They also brought in psychologists and the investigators to talk about what happened.
I did have a slight issue with the portrayal of her mental illness. Oftentimes, mental illness is shown as someone going crazy. While there are real stories of this happening, it can be damaging to those who have the illness to always be shown this way. It often stigmatizes the people themselves.
Despite these concerns, the documentary is an interesting look at the internet, media and investigation. However, it missed the true purpose of this film which is highlighting the tragedy of Elisa Lam’s death, and how the system has failed so many people.
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