Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel

Title says it all, good production and a tragic tale ruined by including a bunch of nobodies who use YouTube to promote their bizarre ideas for likes and subscriptions. Completely disrespectful to the victim and the family.

This is a fascinating story which deserves to be grippingly told, but between all the pointless youtuber opinions and the overly drawn-out narrative of the hotel's past I lost interest quickly. Classic Netflix doc - it would have been a riveting 2 hour tale but it felt very diluted across 4 episodes.

All I can say is the trailer that Netflix produced for this was incredible, it drew me right in, you're sold the mystery of the infamous Cecil Hotel.

There's the side of it that really is tragic, the story of poor Elisa Lam, the scenes of her grieving family, and that pretty awful moment where she's last seen alive.

Part of me finds the whole thing a little tasteless, the poor girls story is sensationalised beyond belief, and some of the interviewees maybe should have had a bit more consideration for poor Elisa.

It's well made, it's well produced, but at just under four hours...... It could have been told in one, they really did drag this one out.

Very slow, pretty boring, and slightly tasteless I thought.

Poor, 4/10.

The Elisa Lam story is both interesting and tragic. Aspects of this Documentary are interesting and well told but the grouping of YouTube numb skulls, spouting their conspiracies, drag it down. They are essentially just a bunch of self styled "internet sleuths", whose actual grasp on the events is as insignificant as they are. Everyone, up to and including Santa, comes under suspicion from these nitwits. They desperately want to include themselves in the drama of it all, and even go so far as to group at the Hotel to point and whisper.

I will keep my review short. The story about the vanishing speaks to everybody's imagination. But the story is pretty straightforward, this is coming from somebody who has been working in psychiatry whole his life. She was bipolar and suffered clearly from a psychosis. I work with these people on a daily base. Yes, it can be so bad, people would bring themselves in strange situations. In that way 4 episodes is just too much for a story that could have been told in 2 episodes (at most).

I found this documentary much more interesting in another aspect. The way 8 years ago fake news was invented by stupid people on the internet just blowing their mind on things they have absolutely no knowledge about. I was heavily triggered by the youtubers/influencers claiming one stupid theory after the other. On the way almost destroying a young musician life. This is still the dark side of the internet and it saddens me to see where we are at almost a decade later.