2019's First Movie Release 'Eli' Is Inspiring Fans

With 2019 right around the corner, I thought I would get a jump on researching and preparing for the first new movies of the new year. January is not traditionally a time when we see many quality movies. Most of the time, we are seeing the dregs of the Hollywood studios, the films that have languished on shelves for months and years at a time or movies that the studios know cannot compete in the more crowded portions of the year.

This task is usually not particularly difficult, but something strange when I began my research for the new movie Eli, which will be among the first two movies released in 2019, on Friday, January 4. Eli tells the story of a young boy who is being treated for a rare disease at a medical clinic that begins to transform slowly into some kind of gothic prison. Director Ciaran Foy won the directorial job on Eli with his economical work on Sinister 2 back in 2015.

As I was saying, the task of researching a new release movie less than a month before it is released is usually not all that difficult. There are often copious amounts of information made available online or there are leaked rumors about the movie, things that give you some semblance of the thought process that brings a particular movie together. The kinds of information that I can fashion into a healthy preview piece such as this.

Eli, however, has proven to be a strange bird. As I began my research on Eli with a simple search of YouTube to have a look at the trailer I was met with something odd, a series of fan made trailers so remarkably amateur that they are almost unwatchable. Take for instance this trailer created by Cartoons Make Life Better, linked here. It’s a fan made cut trailer that includes no scenes from Eli, but rather, out of context scenes from the 2011 Anthony Hopkins exorcism movie, The Rite. Why?

My search continued and the next entry was another fan made trailer for Eli created by Just Way and posted in September of this year. This fan made trailer cuts together scenes from a series of exorcism based horror movies including Mama, The Exorcist and, once again, The Rite, it’s linked here. Is Eli about exorcism? There is nothing to indicate the plot has anything to do with exorcism but then again, there currently no official trailers for the movie and the plot synopsis is remarkably vague, as noted earlier.

One helpful YouTuber, at the very least, thought it would be good to include actual information about the movie Eli in their fan-made trailer though it somehow becomes even more bizarre than the two I have already mentioned. A YouTuber named Film Trailer created a splash animation that lists the stars, director, producer and bit players in the movie, right down to actor Nathaniel Woolsey who is credited as "Punk."

The trailer is so bizarrely earnestly 80s inspired that it reminded me of that short-lived Cartoon Network parody, “Too Many Cooks.” It would work as a prank if the creator had made the video 20 minutes long and included credits for the Key Grip, the assistant to actress Kelly Reilly and the catering staff, all while using the single most 80s commercial riff imaginable. It’s like a relic from a 90s late night infomercial. You can see it for yourself at the top of this article.

I just wanted to learn a little about the movie Eli and the internet rewarded my curiosity with borderline non-sequitur re-imaginings of a movie that no one outside the filmmakers have actually seen. I’ve never seen this kind of seemingly sweded viral marketing campaign. I call it that but the filmmakers thus far have nothing to do with this, it’s a bizarre, very small cabal of YouTubers who appear to be adopting Eli for reasons that only make sense to themselves.

As for what I intended to make the content of this review, it’s far less interesting than these bizarre trailers. Eli stars actress Kelly Reilly as Eli’s mom, the always terrific Lily Taylor as Eli’s doctor and young newcomer Charlie Shotwell as the title character, Eli. Stranger Things bit player Sadie Sink co-stars as well though I don’t know yet what role her character Haley plays in this plot. The film is directed by Ciaran Foy whose Sinister 2 was… not great.