However, like so much else in this film, it is only lip service. The picture is touching the immortal question that plagues all mortal beings: what comes next (if anything)? The film pays plenty of lip service to the scientific theory that all near-death experiences with bright lights are just a chemical reaction to DMT flooding the body. The most thought provoking ideas raised by The Lazarus Effect are why it is such a disappointing experience to sit through. Carnage and death ensues since some form of Hell has come with her. All of this is clumsily dropped in about five minutes, and we’re off to bringing a dead dog back to life, and then after a freak lab accident, Zoe as well. Using the vantage of a new undergrad named Ava (Sarah Bolger), who was brought in to videotape the transcendent moments of their experiments, the film swiftly and economically invents a found footage-ish exposition dump to lay out their plans, as well as introduce us to stoner biotech bad boy Clay (Evan Peters), and sweet computer guy Niko (Donald Glover), the latter of whom is carrying a barely concealed torch for Zoe. Why such disparate perspectives would collaborate on playing God is an intriguing question that, like so many others in The Lazarus Effect, is promptly ignored. Thus it makes her engagement with lead scientist Frank (Mark Duplass) a bit of a curiosity since he is an out-and-out atheist who wants to disprove there is an afterlife by bringing the recently deceased back to life. She is a kind-hearted woman with a terrible childhood secret that haunts her and feeds into her Catholic guilt as an adult.
#THE LAZARUS EFFECT MOVIE#
When the movie starts, Wilde is the very charming if somewhat tightly wound Zoe, one of the lead medical researchers of the Lazarus Project at an unnamed university.
And being awakened from her brief trip to Hell has left her very scorned, indeed. However, it does enjoy one genuine thrill where no screeching score or sound effects are necessary: Olivia Wilde’s wonderfully demented performance as a modern day Frankenstein monster who revels in the wrath of a woman scorned. If only it lived up to its animated namesake.Īs the story of a group of researchers attempting to play God and finding out that they are actually dealing with something far more hellacious, The Lazarus Effect is the quintessential B-horror film that builds on a very tantalizing concept, and then buries it deep in the earth for the sake of familiar jump scares and failing light switches. Named after that biblical fellow who proved to have merely one foot in the grave, this Lazarus pulls from all of the above material for an intended February fright. And this lingering question has persisted up to Pet Sematary and through our latest Blumhouse Production: The Lazarus Effect. What happens if we cure death? What if we could bring someone back from the Great Beyond and into a world where the grass is a little less green? More than a science fiction concept, this idea set the standard as the first sci-fi tale ever published in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
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