Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel (2021)

I was surprised to see that this Netflix miniseries has been ranked in aggregate on IMDb by some 16,000 viewers at 5.9 stars out of 10. I did what I could, giving it 8 stars, but one person can only do so much here. The complaint, as far as I can tell, seems to be the same as mine about Wormwood a few weeks ago, which is that it is too long and padded out. But that was not my experience. Parachuting in to check out the first few minutes of the first episode—a new habit of mine, and I'm quick to abandon ship—I was completely pulled into this strange story of a young woman's disappearance from the legendary Cecil Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. Looking further into it before committing myself to all four hours I noted that the documentary was coproduced and directed by Joe Berlinger, coproducer and codirector of the memorable Paradise Lost series, recounting the harrowing story of the murder of several children in May 1993 in West Memphis, Arkansas. So that did it and I went all the way with this fascinating documentary, which is so skillfully put together. It tells the story of Elisa Lam who disappeared from the hotel in 2013 in mysterious circumstances. She was a young Chinese-Canadian woman traveling. She kept a prodigious account of her own life on Tumblr. The elements in the case were baffling and tantalizing: video of Lam behaving strangely in a late-night hotel elevator the night she disappeared basically drove the whole phenomenon of it. Unexplained editing of the video confused it further, along with an army of eerie coincidences and the very strange circumstances of her death and how her body was discovered. Everything is ultimately explained, and it's all there to be discovered. Berlinger evidently still has some of his old sympathies, as the case also involves accusations against an outsider figure, a Mexican death-metal musician named Morbid who happened to be staying in the hotel at the time Lam disappeared. In this age of social media mob action, he found himself the object of hundreds of self-styled web sleuths who were sure he was good for the crime. Not surprisingly, perhaps, The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel and the case are deeply involved with the effects of swarming social media. Sometimes I think social media is all there is to think about after climate change. Add to the mix that the Cecil Hotel, located at the edge of the Los Angeles Skid Row, has a longstanding reputation for being haunted, tainted, cursed, and otherwise an ineffable vortex of evil. What a cluster! The only spoiler I'll mention is that, even though I am generally sympathetic with their impulse, 99% of the web sleuths were wrong about everything in this case. Berlinger and crew put this miniseries together artfully, making it work well as a suspense production, and a lot of the interviews are just great—not only the people corralled for it but all the things they have to say. This is a good one. I think I've talked myself into revising my ranking to a 9.