Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel | Review

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is an effortlessly bingable, yet uniquely melancholic true crime documentary saga that plays with audience expectations of the genre. Directed by documentary veteran Joe Berlinger (the Paradise Lost series, Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, Whitey), this first in a planned Netflix true crime anthology series looks back at one of the most obsessed over missing persons cases in recent memory. A story of a young traveller who disappeared without a trace while staying at an infamous, notoriously seedy Los Angeles landmark, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is captivating, yet obvious for the first few episodes before turning things wildly on their head in the later stages. The mystery at the heart of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel isn’t much of a mystery when the facts are put together in a row, but Berlinger uses his latest effort as an opportunity to caution viewers about the dangers of jumping to conclusions too early.

In late January of 2013, Canadian university student Elisa Lam decided to take a solo trip to Los Angeles to clear her head, something she spoke about enthusiastically on her Tumblr blog in the weeks and days leading up to her departure. Like most students, Elisa was travelling on a budget, and for her stay, she settled upon accommodations at Stay-On-Main, which is basically a glorified hostel catering to young people in the heart of downtown Los Angeles. Elisa Lam was last heard from on January 31. All of her belongings were left behind, there were no apparent signs of foul play in her room, and few leads surfaced for LAPD detectives.

What many unsuspecting travellers drawn in by the promise of a good deal don’t know about Stay-On-Main is that it’s actually housed within the notorious Cecil Hotel, a once resplendent place to stay that fell out of repair during the Great Depression. From that point on, the Cecil Hotel – located right in the middle of Skid Row – became infamous for violent and drug related activity. It was such a welcoming place that Night Stalker Richard Ramirez called it home for an extended period of time.  As one of the many guests who stayed there during the height of its worst years in the 1970s and 80s could tell you, there were certain floors one never went to unless they were asking to get killed. Several facelifts to make the property more appealing floundered, with the impoverished surrounding neighbourhood not doing the Cecil any favours. Conditions of the rooms were disgusting, the security was shoddy on the best of days, and, by former hotel manager Amy Price’s own estimation, the staff were putting in at least one to three calls a day to the police at the height of their troubles. The disappearance of Elisa Lam was just another tragic incident to tack onto their increasing list of scandals.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel taps into public fascination with the case from the outset, complete with thoughtful, in-depth interviews with key figures who were caught up in its vortex. The infamy of the Cecil Hotel, combined with a scant number of tangible clues, turned the disappearance of the 21-year old Vancouver native into an addiction for most internet sleuths. Armchair detectives pored over a security camera video that seemed to capture Lam’s erratic final moments, a blurry, strange piece of footage that offers far more questions than answers. Her tersely worded blog posts were dissected as if they were written in code. Early on, Berlinger drops some hints about the case’s most likely outcome and what these clues could all add up to, but this four part series keeps posing a question that was on the minds of many unlicensed investigators: At what point do too many coincidences and unanswered questions point to a grand conspiracy? Berlinger metes out details, clues, theories, and false leads incrementally, always keeping viewers on their toes, even if one thinks they know precisely where Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is going in advance.

Towards the end of the third episode – just as the Cecil Hotel has become a hot spot for so-called “murder tourism” – things get really wild. The Lam case is tied to everything from a local tuberculosis outbreak, to black metal, to a famous Japanese horror movie and its American remake. Suspects are vetted, dismissed, and then considered again. No one can agree on the involvement of the hotel or the surrounding and neglected neighbourhood. Could drugs be involved, or was Lam caught up in something different, but just as profoundly dark or sad? But by the fourth and final episode of Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel, Berlinger’s ultimate goals crystalize and deliver an emotional gut punch to the audience.

While it was fun getting caught up in all the swerves and twists in this case that I previously had little awareness of, my own personal theory as to what happened to Elisa Lam was solidified before the end of the first episode, and it turns out that my suspicions were mostly correct. Through its delicate construction, Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel becomes a counterpoint to recent series in the style of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and Don’t Fuck with Cats, in which everyday people on the internet are able to help law enforcement track down dangerous, violent criminals. Here, the leads provided are both helpful and hurtful. They can give false hope and ruin lives that are caught up in this tragedy by proxy. It’s in these closing stages that Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel gets most of its impact.

It’s the final episode that propels Berlinger’s series from being good to great, serving as an unlikely companion piece to the series of documentaries that first gained him notoriety. Within the margins of this case, and all the overlapping, sometimes contradictory investigations surrounding it, lies a potent examination of disinformation in society today. In true crime, popular culture, and politics, people will believe in anything they’re fed as long as it conforms to their greatest suspicions and fears in the most extreme ways possible. People who start out with good and righteous intentions can be suddenly robbed of their empathy and common sense just for the sake of an internet aided dopamine rush. (And yes, much like with the last U.S. presidential election, there are still some who insist the Lam case isn’t solved.) Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is a story of a tragedy that became a circus. In the end, that circus only created more of a tragedy.

Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel is available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, February 10, 2021.