Publication Date: 08-12-2026

Elijah Peel (2026) review

Dir. Nathan Ross Murphy and Kevin D. Sepe

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

Loosely based on the life of its co-director/writer/producer Kevin D. Sepe, Elijah Peel revolves around the titular, haggard rockstar (Robert Malcolm Cumming). In an aggressively loud, booming opening sequence, we see Elijah snort coke and drink himself into a drug-addled stupor, much to the chagrin of his manager, Rock (Kevin Sorbo), who, like us, has seen this movie too many times. Rock drags him to a sound check, where he has a heart attack and ends up in the ER.

In the closed-off, quiet walls of the hospital, Elijah meets Jessica (Evelyn Grace Kite), a plucky toddler undergoing chemotherapy for her aggressive cancer. She knows all about Elijah. Not only does she like some of his songs, but she’s adept enough with the TV remote in her hospital room to watch Inside Edition and have heard about his tabloid-worthy mishap. In just a few minutes after their meet-cute, she’s grilling him about his indiscretions and asking him if he knows Jesus.

Thus is Elijah Peel, a slow, sullen drama set mostly in the aforementioned hospital in which we watch these two sick patients talk. And talk they do. Sepe must’ve found the words bleeding from his fingertips as he typed them, and evidently refused to use the backspace key when his own verbosity got in the way. Conversations that consume an upwards of five-or-six minutes say what a few lines of thoughtful, succinct dialog could have in half the time. Maybe this script was an exercise in the Ayn Rand school of thought; why use 100 words when you can use 1,000 to say the same thing?

Supporting characters that enter and exit include Jessica’s mother (April Billingsley), who is tasked with being overprotective and not much else. A nurse (Princess Elmore), who helped Elijah with his recovery, and later gives him those kinds of surface-level talks about Christ you only see in movies of this ilk — as if he has never heard in his 35 years of living that Jesus died for our sins. That said, Kite delivers her lines with steadfast conviction, proving to be precocious. The film’s biggest revelation is that when Sorbo isn’t using caricatured roles as an atheist as a thinly veiled commentary for godless, scummy liberals, he can actually turn in a mature performance.

Cumming is convincing as Elijah, but the dull, drab malaise of melodrama constantly weighs on the entire project. The film’s second gear is that of Christian pandering with conversations around the teachings of Christ never being deeper than a kiddie pool. Overcast visuals, excessive grays, and the muted exteriors of the hospital setting might as well serve as visual melatonin. That said, catastrophic sound mixing — which has the score stomping on the dialog at times, while being louder than the separate dialog in general — is liable to jar you awake.

Elijah Peel isn’t so much a bad movie, but a terribly uninteresting one. Its glacial pacing and abundance of score-driven emotional crescendos have all the subtly of a clodhopper. You might recall the late, great comedian Patrice O’Neal’s bit about TV commercials featuring abused animals. You can practically sing your own improvised lyrics describing what’s happening on-screen and marry them to the languid strings of the orchestration. It amounts to misery porn, and a glossy, beatific ending comes across as cowardly towing the line between wanting to show the ugliness of childhood cancer while not giving Jessica any true conclusion to her story. Movie tickets are only getting more expensive. You should at least be treated to a credible ending for a movie you pay to see.

Starring: Robert Malcolm Cumming, Evelyn Grace Kite, Kevin Sorbo, April Billingsley, Princess Elmore, and Teresa Cesario. Directed by: Nathan Ross Murphy and Kevin D. Sepe.