TL;DR Eloise (2016) Review
Eloise (2016) displays that mid-2000s weird charm where horror wasn’t just gore and jump scares but tried telling strange, layered stories. The plot? A dude named Jacob needs some dusty family records to unlock a fat inheritance. He and his friends break into a decaying asylum. Naturally, things go sideways. What makes Eloise work isn’t scares, it’s the narrative. The way time loops act like ghosts themselves is clever, atmospheric, and leaves you with just enough questions to keep you thinking without collapsing in on itself.
But yeah, it stumbles some seriously tired trope. Don’t expect the black friend to last long, and try not to let the careless treatment of mental disability (and disposbility) hang you up. The movie flirts with the real horrors of asylum history including racism, abuse, forced treatment. Sadly it only scratches the surface of that sordid history. That missed opportunity feels almost poetic, in the worst way.
Then there’s the real Eloise: a grotesque piece of Michigan history where medical innovation came wrapped in cruelty. It’s now a haunted escape room attraction, which feels ghoulish in all the wrong ways. Still, I’d rewatch Eloise. It tried—and sometimes that matters more than perfection.
This one is well worth a watch for those horror fans that like their scares rooted in historical reality.
3.5/5.0
Eloise (2016) – Extended Review
I swear I liked this movie. It won’t seem like it but it was overall enjoyable and I would watch it again, on purpose.
Synopsis
Following the death of his estranged father Jacob has an estate to settle. Standing between him and a cool million dollars are some missing family records from the historical Eloise Asylum. He, with the help of a few friends, takes it upon themselves to break into the restricted wings of the derelict asylum to find some answers.
First Thoughts
Oh boy, the mid-two-thousands and horror have such a niche place in my heart. Something I love about this era of filmmaking is its willingness to tell stories that are odd and full of the complexity storytelling deserves. It’s a true testament to the craft and in this case, paid off well.
I feel like horror as a genre has lost this muscle in recent years because creativity alone doesn’t guarantee a payout. That’s proven by this film’s rotten tomato score and box office gains. Gore and shock are what bring in the crowds even if they leave barely satisfied.
This movie relied very little on its ability to scare you in favor of telling a story. It made the horrific elements of it hit so much harder.
Themes
The intentional use of time as a proxy of character within its own right was such a clever way of showing different versions of what we think of when we hear the word “ghost”. Or. at least. that was my take on it.
If you’ve read my bio here you know that I love to explore abandoned places. There is this idea within urbexing communities that ghosts aren’t dead people but broken timelines that peak into the flowing existence of another plain where that location is still in use.
Meaning somewhere, in a different universe someone could think their house is haunted because they hear creaky floorboards in their house, but really it’s you getting up in the night for a drink of water over here in our universe.
I mean that’s kind of the entire plot of this movie, but with a more palpable ability to interact. I could not get enough of this storyline and found myself having so many questions by the end of it.
Did the time loop close after they set the fire (fun fact, arsonists set to the remaining Elosie complex buildings in 2016, the same year this movie came out) Was the homeless guy/nurse aware of the time warp and using it to grant himself a sort of immortality at the expense of the asylum’s past, did the caretakers of the Asylum know about the loop?
Questions like this are exactly what you want from a viewer. Something for them to ruminate on without the ability to fall into plot holes big enough to sink their suspended disbelief.
Tropes
Something should be said for the trope most notable in this that no one is surprised by, but ever disappointed. That is the “kill the black friend,” trope. The beginning of the story starts with Dell being the “Bad influence” friend that talked Jacob, Pia, and Scotty into venturing past the inciting incident and into the main plot. From there it was only a matter of minutes before he outlived his contextual usefulness and was subsequently killed off to make room for the main character’s character development.
It wasn’t even that he was killed well. Much like in my previous review of Stonehearst (2014), Eloise did touch on the dark history of asylums and their ties to racism and that could have been explored within the narrative with no more effort than it took to drown him.
A similar fate happened to Scotty, the only genuinely disabled character within the show. His only use was to get Jacob and Pia to follow him deeper into the asylum and act as a moral break for Pia. His, at the least, came with some backstory attached, but we never saw where he fit into the time warp past knowing he was experimented on.
I am not opposed to killing off a large cast of characters. The Final Girl is a perfectly adequate trope when thought through and intentionally done. Writing is meant to reflect our existence and though the characters may be functional they don’t know that. People have idiosyncrasies and major complexities that should be considered and explored.
The entirety of Eloise was based around fear, yet only two of those fears were explored and only one was only half ass explained.
Truthfully the lack of representation felt oddly poetic in a really disappointing way. Given the pattern of disability and racism erasure that happens within history the idea that these characters were forgotten about in favor of the more palpable people this story sort of reflects reality without trying.
History
Okay, now time to geek a bit.
Two years after Michigan became a state in 1839 Wayne County bought up a good chunk of land including a farm land and a tavern called The Black Horse Tavern. The cabin was given some structural additions and dubbed it the Wayne County Poor House. At the time it housed 32 people.
(Poor House: This was exactly what it sounds like. It was a place for local officials to send destitute people where they wouldn’t bother society. It was a bit different from homeless shelters as we know them today because the occupants were often involuntarily admitted and had no say over the treatment of their person. They were also not regulated by any government entity so your treatment could vary vastly on the place you lived. This was meant to be a shameful punishment for being poor and was meant to motivate people to work at all costs.)
So Wayne County Poor House was not necessarily built at the time for the disabled but did have them within their “care”. When I say care, I mean chained to the walls above the pig barn.
In 1872 the complex expanded to include some of the surrounding land, eventually growing into its own self-sufficient city. It had its own postal services, restaurants, and even its own police services.
In 1894 the poorhouse was renamed. This came about because they wanted their own post office but there were naming laws in place that kept the word count and meat of the name short and sweet. A retired postmaster recommended the name Eloise after his daughter and it stuck.
Though it was still a poor house it had now grown to a more substantial size with sprawling buildings to house, really anyone who needed treatment, a place to stay, work, etc.
It took almost no time at all for reports of severe abuse to begin to circulate. There was no distinction made between a medical patient and an inhabitant and they were given the same treatments.
In 1934 there were eight thousand Inmates. Yes, they did begin to refer to them as inmates DESPITE still being considered a sanatorium.
Where to Watch Eloise
If you didn’t know the scientific method didn’t really begin to apply to medical practice until the late 1800’s. This paired with the very new medical discipline, psychology the dark rise of “Asylum” was the new big societal advancement.
This created a culture of experimentation and who better to practice on than the ones who society wanted to rid themselves of? It is a common saying that medical advancement wasn’t made without war crimes and nowhere is that truer than Eloise.
Just a few of the treatments they were known for were sensory deprivation, spinning chairs, lobotomies, shock therapy, skull trepanation, insulin coma therapy, and the list goes on painfully long. The advancements that came from this dark history were the very first uses of an X-ray machine, kidney dialysis, and advancements in electroconvulsive therapy.
Eloise Asylum operated from 1839-1982, it had 78 buildings along its nearly 900-acre estate. As of now, there are only five surviving buildings and one of many mass cemeteries.
Today you can take tours of the Eloise Asylum. They also host escape rooms and aesthetic haunting events. I have very strong feelings about this but we will leave that for another time.
History has never been kind to minorities of any station. I love history because those who lived it deserve to not be forgotten.
Eloise (2016) - Revealing the Wounds Left By History - Malevolentdark
Director: Robert Legato
Date Created: 1970-01-01 00:33
3.5