We are a curious folk us humans on planet Earth, always poking around trying figure things out, expand our knowledge and well, get all up in other people’s business. Sometimes, that can have some advantages and other times, not so much. Welcome to Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, a new documentary that overstays its welcome to a degree while trying to make a larger statement than the crime it investigates.
Back in 2013, a video went viral – on YouTube especially – of a young woman entering a hotel elevator and proceeding to act rather oddly before exiting on the same floor and seemingly, uttering, disappearing. I remember it well myself, having it pop up on my feed and sharing it with colleagues and friends. It was the stuff of legends in terms of everything one needs in igniting a conspiracy, and oh boy did it do just that. Like an atomic bomb.
The girl is Elisa Lam from British Columbia, traveled down to L.A. and spending some time in the famous Cecil Hotel. While I didn’t much care about that at the time, only in whatever happened to her after she left the elevator, others took it upon themselves to dive into the deep end and uncover the truth as it were. I’m a pragmatic fellow and almost ravenously skeptic so I wasn’t having any of the wild theories bouncing about concerning hauntings and spirits and what have you, just thinking that something bad must have happened, either by herself or at the hands of someone else.
Eventually, her body was found in one of the hotel’s rooftop water tanks, which was discovered when guests began complaining about discolored and foul-smelling water in their rooms. That’s harrowing stuff and something I doubt most would be able to really recover from (as is made note of in the series). The police had their hands full in trying to make sense of how she got there. They were the ones that released the cryptic looking video, hoping some might have some help in tracking her whereabouts. What they didn’t expect was a maelstrom of “internet sleuths” taking up the charge and, with only what they could scrabble together online, create their own stories of Lam’s fate.
It’s a tragic story and the filmmakers try hard to wrap all of this in a long expository investigation not only about the young woman but the hotel itself, which as it turns out, has a particularly dark history when one aims a light squarely on these events, including rooming Richard Ramirez the infamous Night Stalker serial killer of the 1980s. The series goes almost out of its way with endless drone shots of the building in trying to give the place an ominous veneer while detailing past troubles with tenants.
It’s supposed to prop up the idea that the building itself is somehow responsible but honestly feels mostly irresponsible on the part of the filmmakers, who spend far too much time on this incidental peripheral stuff that has really nothing to do with Lam’s fate. Coincidence is fun maybe to recognize but a bit shameless when presented as if so nefariously connected in some way. This is paralleled by interviews with a few select “sleuthers” who spent a lot of time “investigating” the disappearance, and it’s genuinely intriguing to see how deeply some of these people committed themselves to Elisa, surely with good intentions even if, as some admit later in the series, they themselves fell down their own rabbit holes (the name of an actual episode in the series).
Police maybe didn’t expect such international interest in the story, themselves dedicated to learning what happened but treating it as a missing persons case and then cause of death. They did not release all the details, which is naturally to be expected, but to sleuthers, gaps in the case became opportunities to wedge ideas that once let loose to the internet, found dangerous footing. That hit hardest on a musician named Morbid, a death metal singer who happened to have stayed at the hotel once and wrote songs that to sleuthers seemed like confessions of murderous crimes. This chapter in the series is the hardest to watch and is evidence alone of the greater tragedy of Lam’s unfortunate demise.
While Lam’s death has been publically settled by authorities, this documentary hopes to answer all the lingering questions since, some that seemingly connect it to movies (2005’s Dark Water for one) and television and more. While I appreciate the often very strange coincidences (including a truly remarkable name for a health test that was circulating about the area at the time), the series doesn’t seem to want to stick to the science of it all, even as it puts the actual investigators, criminologists, and medical experts who worked the case on screen.
Instead, it uses flashy re-enactments of sleuthers and past events that don’t offer any weight to the explanation, including an actor portraying Lam as she moves about the city and hotel, her face always properly obscured. It feels a bit goofy at times honestly, the series clearly trying to pad out a story that could have, no should have, been told in ninety minutes instead of the four hour-long episodes it runs. I would have much rather spent that time on the discovery of the hard evidence and how they came upon it, and while it’s important to reveal the power the internet has in such matter, it’s not presented with any analytic context, only that these things happen (which was handled better in the earlier series Don’t F**K With Cats).
Elisa Lam had some real hardships in her life and tried to find a way to live with that, expressing herself quite eloquently online on her own expansive Tumblr account. The internet gave her a platform to tell her story in ways that still seem to have impact and it’s touching to see how much she called out to the world and connected to those who perhaps share similar conditions. Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel does offer a strong invitation into this one side of Lam’s life but very little else, her family and friends never sharing a single word about her on screen, her parents and sister seen only for a moment at a police press conference. Perhaps that’s best, that we never really know the whole story of Lam, only the parts that led her to the roof an old L.A. hotel and a choice that has left millions wondering why.