Netflix’s Elisa Lam Documentary is an Endurance Test

(Spoiler Alert)

Crime Scene: The Vanishing of Elisa Lam is the first season of a projected ongoing true crime docu-drama series on Netflix. Joe Berlinger directed the four episodes focusing on the tragic death of Lam, a young Canadian woman who had been traveling through California alone in early 2013 and died under mysterious circumstances at the notorious Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles.

After a period of nineteen days in which Lam was missing, her body was discovered in one of the Cecil’s rooftop water tanks. A video of Lam seemingly alone but panicked in one of the hotel’s elevators was released to the public. In it, she pushes numerous buttons including the door hold, freezing the elevator, and then gesticulates wildly in the hallway just outside the elevator doors as though someone were there and possibly menacing her. But no one besides Lam is ever seen in the video. And then she vanishes from view. This is one floor below the top floor with its access to the hotel’s rooftop.

I have to admit that Mark Serrels over at c/net already voiced the litany of complaints I had while watching this documentary and after finishing it. If you’ve already watched the show and want to read a succinct and devastating review, that’s the place to go.

I agree with Serrels that the major gravamen is that the documentary is way too long for the amount of information which is imparted. And that it manipulates the viewer in unsavory ways. Berlinger apparently wants…