The Lazarus Effect

TA group of scientists led by romantic couple Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde are working on a project to briefly restore brain function in clinically dead patients in hopes of allowing medical professionals longer time to work on critical patients. Their experiments seem to work better than expected when a revived dog continues to live long after the effect of its treatment should have worn off. When a laboratory accident electrocutes one of their own, the others decide to use the technique on the deceased, with seeming success. But they soon realize that something is not quite right with their colleague.

The movie has some style, and some creepy moments, but it works better when the story flirts with how guilt and religion can effect one's psyche in positive and negative ways. The cast is fine, although it was odd seeing the usually funny Duplass in a straight-faced role.

The Lazarus Effect (2015)

** (out of 4)

A group of scientist discover a formula that could help bring the dead back to life. The main scientist Frank (Mark Duplass) and his fiancé (Olivia Wilde) mess up when signing their contract and end up getting kicked out of the laboratory. Needing to get enough of their records to carry on, the group sneak back into the lab but after an accident Frank's fiancé is killed. They decide to use the formula to bring her back to life but things don't go as planned.

THE LAZARUS EFFECT has a few interesting ideas and some great performances, which keep it from being a complete trainwreck but there's no question that the film doesn't take its subject serious enough to have the film work. There's no question that there are elements of FLATLINERS here but people will also be thinking of LUCY, which was released the previous year as this film.

It should be noted that without the end credits this movie runs just 76 minutes, which is extremely short in today's time. I personally love shorter movies but this one here is just so uneven that the film pretty much ends just as you feel it should be taking off. I say that because there are some interesting ideas about Heaven and Hell here but sadly very few of them are fully explored because once the fiancé is brought back to life the film turns into a rather generic horror movie. I'm not sure why the screenplay would introduce such good idea but then not do anything with them and especially since the film is so short and could have been expanded on.

The performances in the film is what save it and help carry the material. Both Duplass and Wilde are very good and especially believable in their roles. Supporting players Sarah Bolger, Evan Peters and Donald Glover are also very good. Technically speaking the film features a nice score, good cinematography and the director certainly makes a professional looking film. With that said, THE LAZARUS EFFECT completely falls apart during the final fifteen minutes, which is a real shame.

Sadly this is an ultimately unrewarding film, to read the plot, you'd be forgiven for expecting something dark, original and interesting, when in reality it's generic, flat, and badly realised.

The production values are a little poor, and the storytelling is disjointed, lacks any sort of core plot, at times it seemed to make no sense.

A few times they could have gone for real scares and horror, sadly no such moments ever happened. The dog could have been good.

Quite poor. 4/10

Any five to ten minute excerpt from this movie could easily lead a viewer to conclude that this is a well made horror or suspense thriller. The production values are high, the performances good, and so on.

The problem is that the parts of the film don't fit together. The sequence of action has the usual slow build and accelerating pace of any good thriller, but while the set-up is promising, and the events proceed logically enough as interesting and sympathetic characters are frightened, threatened or killed off, the reasons underlying the events remain obscure.

Hints and suggestive exposition are introduced, and then forgotten. There are explicit references to religious-themed horror fantasy, speculative science, and even a few elements of a possible conspiracy. An elaborate backstory is gradually revealed, and then abruptly dismissed. The conclusion doesn't really conclude anything: there's a decisive ending, but no resolution, no revelation, not even a clear idea of the probable consequences.

It's possible a re-edit could address these issues and make it a decent film. As it stands, though, it just doesn't work.

When I found this film, I thought it would be a cinematic approach to Lazarus Syndrome, which is the apparently spontaneous reactivation of the heartbeat after all attempts to resuscitate a patient in cardiac arrest have failed. This is a very rare situation to happen, and I thought the movie would be about that. I was wrong.

The film's script follows a small group of young scientists who are carrying out a controversial and eventually revolutionary study: the creation of a serum that allows the dead to be reanimated. They are testing it on animals, but a bureaucratic twist ends up denying them the possibility of continuing the study. However, they decide to continue secretly, even though the results of tests on animals have revealed that there are dangerous brain changes, resulting from the application of the serum, in the resuscitated animals. After breaking into the lab at night, the group has an accident and one of the group's scientists dies. They then decide to use the serum to bring her back to life.

The film has an interesting base premise and one that will draw some inspiration from the source of "Frankenstein" and other mad or amoral scientists. These are fascinating and frightening topics, because we naturally fear those men who use their genius and wisdom without any moral concern to guide them. However, the film fails to develop this in the best way: the whole question that leads to the expulsion of the scientists from that laboratory is, to say the least, unconvincing, and any minimally serious scientist would be incapable of performing an experiment on human beings without solid positive results in the previous stages. It is a huge nonsense that tramples everything we consider as a "scientific method".

The cast has its good moments. Olivia Wilde does a really good job, she's convincing, and it's not difficult to sympathize with her character, for her stubbornness and sympathy. Mark Duplass didn't seem so committed or believable to me, but he has some very good moments, particularly in the second half of the film. Sarah Bolger (who I only knew from her role in the "Tudors" series) is beautiful, but in addition to her feminine beauty, she also gives us a mature and interesting interpretation, particularly in the final scenes of the film.

On a technical level, the film doesn't have much to offer us. The cinematography is fairly generic, and the editing appears to have been harsh, with mangled subplots and a total runtime reduced to just over an hour. The sets are good enough, especially the labs used in the filming, and the soundtrack is good enough, though not remarkable.