Verschwunden: Tatort Cecil Hotel

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.

Will Netflix ever learn that their true crime documentaries don't need to be 4 hours long? Even the Night Stalker felt long & drawn out when that spanned years. Apart from the elevator footage & uncovering the body, what else really happened?? And who are these nut jobs who don't even know Elisa but are behaving like they lost a love one & going to the crime scene 10-20 times. Finding internet fame over the death of someone else doesn't sit right with me. I feel like Buzzfeed Unsolved did a better episode on the Cecil Hotel. Save some time & watch that instead.

Am very much interested in the subject matter, and the history surrounding the Cecil hotel. I really enjoyed the interviews with the hotel employees, but I was hoping to learn more about the actual forensic investigation. Yes, LAPD is a part of this documentary, but the YouTuber angle, ughh. Whiny, unhelpful, and super bloated. They literally added nothing of true value to the investigation. Zilch. Also, if you're any kind of traveler, investigate the property, the surroundings in the environment of where you're going! How do people travel, especially internationally, not do this?!?

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.

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.