C.rime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel has all the ingredients of a great mystery of true crime: a missing potential victim; a notorious locale; a dangerous urban environment; a large number of suspects; an avalanche of puzzling details; a viral video that provides far more questions than answers; and a series of coincidences – or are they synchronicities? – suggesting that the affair could be the byproduct of either a government plot or supernatural phenomena. Everything you could possibly want from a genre effort is here, although the best thing about this four-part Netflix series (which will premiere on February 10) is the conclusion, which is a sharp criticism of the conspiracy theorists – and theories – who favor the first turned his story into a cause célèbre.
Directed by Joe Berlinger, who is no stranger to the genre – after he hit the lost paradise trilogy and that of Netflix Conversations with a Murderer: The Ted Bundy Tapes–Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel concerns Elisa Lam, a 21-year-old college student from Vancouver who disappeared on February 1, 2013 while visiting Los Angeles as part of a West Coast vacation. At the time, Lam was staying at the downtown Cecil Hotel, an establishment with a grand entrance and lobby that misrepresented its true, dark nature as a haven for drug users, pimps and murderers. As an inexpensive short- and long-term home for residents of Skid Row – one of the poorest and most crime-ridden metropolitan areas in America – the Cecil had a long, infamous history, including one of the Black Dahlia’s last reported homes, Elizabeth Short , as well as the temporary home of Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, who always walked naked and bloody down the halls on his way to his room after slaughter. Its nickname was ‘Hotel Death’.
The Cecil’s scandalous past was the inspiration for it American Horror Story: Hotel, but Lam probably didn’t know about his reputation. Led by manager Amy Price (seen in new interviews), the hotel split in two, created a second lobby and entrance, completed three floors, and renamed that new section ‘Stay on Main’ as a way to cut budget. to lure. conscious travelers. It was that “special” hostel that Lam visited in early 2013. However, after a few days’ stay, she went to MIA, and flyers posted around town yielded little-promising clues. Through interviews with the detectives who worked on the case, as well as through dramatic reconstructions and narrative readings of Lam’s extensive Tumblr blog – which she viewed as a true online journal –Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel notes the confusing scenario, which initiated a significant LAPD investigation of the hotel that yielded little concrete evidence.
Until the police discovered the video footage of Lam with a security camera in one of the Cecil’s elevators, and hoping that ordinary citizens could help decipher the riddles, they posted it online.
What followed was a bona fide internet sensation as the Lam lift video quickly went viral, sparking intense investigation and debate, inspiring a legion of ‘web sleuths’ – that is, the kind of amateur detectives who helped take down Luka Magnotta, as pictured in Don’t f ** k with cats– to try to unravel what was going on in the confusing clip. Over the course of four minutes, that image shows Lam stepping into the elevator, pressing several buttons, hiding in the corner, poking her head out repeatedly to search for (or engage?) An invisible figure. she moves her hands irregularly (as if in a trance), and eventually depart. Her behavior is bizarre, as is the fact that the elevator doors remain open for an astonishingly long time, and even after they are closed, they reopen to reveal that Lam was on the same floor – this despite the many buttons on the control panel were pressed. should have sent it somewhere else.
There is no clear explanation for this chain of events, what led to such wild online speculation, and what gives Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel its seductive hook. Even with a third episode largely revolving around, Berlinger’s docuseries arouses tension due to the mind-boggling nature of its story. Discussions about the area’s shady dangerousness and the Cecil’s sordid legacy increase the number of possible ways Lam may have been victimized. And once her body is found – floating in one of the rooftop water tanks that had been supplying polluted water to the residents of Cecil for weeks – the question of how she ended up in this fatal situation remains a mystery. Which in turn motivates web sleuths like John Lordan and John Sobhani to watch the viral Lam video, scrutinize the autopsy report, and visit the Cecil in an attempt to solve the case.
“Discussions about the area’s shady dangerousness and the Cecil’s sordid legacy increase the number of possible ways Lam may have been victimized.“
Berlinger exaggerates somewhat with the eerie dramatic reenactments, though Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel benefits from a series of solid talking heads and a central whodunit that proves to be perpetually intriguing, especially as web sleuths start making amazing discoveries, like the striking similarities between Lam’s fate and the 2005 horror remake Dark water, and a government-made test for tuberculosis conducted on Skid Row just days after Lam disappeared – and which, I’m not kidding, was called “Lam-Elisa.” The director leans heavily in these heady revelations as she brings Lam’s Tumblr writing to the fore, which paints her as an adventurous yet troubled young woman who may have been looking for strangers to befriend and struggling with a bipolar disorder she should have medicated with antidepressants and antipsychotics.
In its final episode, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel deduces what really happened to Lam, thus sharply rejecting the online conspiracy suspicion that arose after the debut of her viral video. A clear 21st eternal mystery that turned out to be a tragedy about mental illness, it is proof that fantastic online ‘quests’ (which often amounts to creepy murder tourism) says a lot more about the desires and dreams of the practitioners than about the nominal topics – a disapproval that , when we arrive in 2021 with a plague of deadly QAnon madness, is all too timely.