‘THE LAZARUS EFFECT’ IS SHORT AND SWEET – At The Movies With Kasey
When it comes to scary movies, I really like the artfully made ones or those that are so bad that they are as fun as they are scary. A really bad horror movie, in my book, is a mediocre one. The Lazarus Effect has some clever and campy elements, but is too lukewarm to amount to much fear or fun.
In The Lazarus Effect, a group of scientists are working on a serum that could bring patients back from death, allowing doctors more time to cure them of whatever ailment or injury led to their demise. It sounds cool, but, of course, it comes with some pretty serious moral implications. In short, some interpret the project as “playing God.” Even the scientists on the project debate the big questions that the project raises, as Frank (Mark Duplass) asserts that near-death experiences are just a chemical response in the brain, and his partner/fiancee, Zoe (Olivia Wilde), believes that they can’t discount the possibility of the afterlife. In the midst of a hurried attempt to replicate their experiment, Zoe is accidentally killed and Frank crosses some pretty huge ethical boundaries by injecting her with the serum. When Zoe comes back from the dead, she, Frank, and their crew members, Clay (Evan Peters), Niko (Donald Glover), and Eva (Sarah Bolger), get some pretty alarming answers to the big existential questions they’d been skirting.
The Lazarus Effect has a lot of the hallmarks of a movie I would normally love. It is a short and sweet 82 minutes, takes place in a limited location, and stars a small cast of characters. Additionally, the story features a Mulder and Scully-like debate over the afterlife between two doctors, one of whom balances her Catholic faith with her scientific prowess. On paper, this all sounds great. The problem with The Lazarus Effect is that it squanders all of its setup. The first half of the movie gives plenty of potential for Zoe’s back story of childhood trauma and the debate about the nature of death to develop into some interesting action, and then it crashes into special effects and demonic hijinks that we’ve all probably seen in other movies. Perhaps the most egregious example of this waste is the way the writers seemingly forget about the dog they devoted plenty of time to in the first half hour. The scientists are locked in their basement lab with the dog and the dog, who posed a credible threat in Act I, just kind of disappears from the story.
With these problems, it should be no surprise that the characters are shallow. Zoe and Frank have some interesting elements individually and as a couple, but they are just two members of a five-person ensemble. Evan Peters’ Clay is not so much a person as a plot device, serving as the mouthpiece for information the audience needs. In contrast to Clay’s antagonizing personality, Donald Glover’s Niko longs for Zoe and does not really contribute anything else to the film. In Eva, the writers seem to attempt subverting the sexist norms of the horror genre, creating a final battle between two female characters. But there is so little that we know about Eva that it is hard to invest much in her, no matter how charmingly Sarah Bolger plays the character. To her credit, however, she has enough presence to steal scenes from Olivia Wilde.
Technically, I enjoyed the pacing and framing of The Lazarus Effect. The close quarters of the lab and the relatively conservative use of security camera footage create the feeling of an older type of monster movie. The film has fun with sound tracking and little jump scares while still maintaining a slow burning dread for the first half. These aspects only make it more frustrating, however, when in the end the writers turn to tired and cliched possession antics, presented in a less playful fashion than the earlier scares.
Although The Lazarus Effect has some real charm and a fun framework, it relies on cliches and shallow storytelling and ultimately falls pretty flat. 2/5 stars The Lazarus Effect was written by Luke Dawson and Jeremy Slater and directed by David Gelb. It runs 83 minutes and is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of horror violence, terror and some sexual references.
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