“Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel,” the latest documentary on Netflix, is terrifying. But not for the reasons you might expect.
Focusing on the famous Cecil, a hotel located in downtown Los Angeles, it tells the story of Elisa Lam, a Canadian student who disappeared from the hotel under mysterious circumstances, before later being found drowned.
It’s a true crime documentary’s dream. Grainy’s security footage shows Lam, terrified and strange, in an elevator, hysterically communicating…with another person? A crazy spirit haunting the Cecil? Who knows. Later, Lam’s decomposing body is found in the hotel’s water tank. Residents had been drinking, washing, and brushing their teeth from the tank’s water for days before she was discovered.
With a mystery like this and a legendary director like Joe Berlinger, you'd expect Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel to be truly exceptional. But it's not. It's not even bearable.
It's bad. And not just bad. Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel confuses the situation by lying. It contains unverified conspiracy theories that put already vulnerable victims in further danger.
Warning: Spoilers follow.
The documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is very long. It has four one-hour episodes, but it could have been presented in just one hour.
Cecil Hotel keeps repeating details, playing with time by showing pointless interviews. Is it a production issue? Should Netflix documentaries be endless?
Regardless of all of the above, the Cecil Hotel tests our patience.
Watching any documentary series has intentionally staged situations that are quickly resolved in the next episode, but Cecil Hotel does some unforgivable things.
A specific piece of information, intentionally withheld near the beginning, is used to create mystery and debate about the nature of Lam’s death throughout the documentary, only to be resolved near the end of the final episode. Hours of pointless speculation and – at times – baseless accusations against the police and hotel staff have become completely pointless. There is a line here, and the Cecil Hotel documentary crosses it.
In an effort to extend the show’s run time, Cecil Hotel fills in the minutes of screen time with a rotating cast of “The Internet Sleuths,” who are essentially YouTubers. These ruthless individuals spend hours analyzing the footage that’s circulating, scouring social media , and making some outrageous assumptions that they present on their YouTube channels.
Through these investigations, the Cecil Hotel story encompasses all types of conspiracy theories, lending them credibility and respect. Only to reveal – in the last 10 minutes – that almost everything we were told was a lie.
Of course, all of the above is nothing compared to the treatment that Pablo “Morbid” Vergara, the death metal singer who was embroiled in a whirlwind of unfounded speculation, faced. After a video of his stay at the hotel, “Internet Sleuths” accused Morbid of murdering Lam and dumping her body in the water tank.
The Cecil Hotel documentary not only conceals the fact that Morbid stayed at the hotel 12 months before Lam's disappearance, but also implies that he was involved in her death. Using footage from his death metal videos, alongside death metal lyrics, it deliberately creates a story that his involvement in Lam's death could be a viable possibility.
We later discover that not only was Morbid not in the United States at the time of Lam's disappearance, but he was threatened to the point of attempting suicide and ended up in a psychiatric hospital. All of this happened because of criticism from "Internet Sleuths" who jump to conclusions without any evidence whatsoever.
Spending half the time of your documentary suspecting that the killer is this man is from absurd to potentially disastrous.
The Cecil Hotel could have been an interesting mystery. It could have been a warning about online communities and the collateral damage they cause when they take on the role of law. But it is neither of those things. It is a mess of a documentary that disrespects its audience and the story it is trying to tell, but, worst of all, disrespects the victims.
Information source: cnet.com
