The Lazarus Effect is best before things go horribly wrong. In its first half, the movie plays into the more interesting tropes of science gone mad. It places at its center a couple that has stumbled into something much larger than they had originally conceived, their experiments made all the more compelling by the effect it has had on their relationship. But then the horror starts and the movie seems to forget about all that. It ends up delivering a series of tepid scares that fall well below the standard of the genre.
Frank and Zoe (Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde) are heading up a small team of researchers working on a serum that has the potential to bring dead things back to life, or at least reignite brain activity long enough for emergency responders to do their work. The experiment works, but their results lead to them getting shut down. They decide to continue the experiment on their own, to disastrous ends. They soon discover that there are side effects for their particular method of resurrection. And these side effects quickly prove to be dangerous.
The film doesn't get very far in exploring its premise. The movie makes it clear that resurrection results in violent behavior, but it doesn’t provide much of an explanation for why exactly that is. Horror movies are allowed to be vague in explaining concepts, but this movie takes it to an unreasonable extreme. It's never made clear what exactly sets off the violence, or what the threat seeks to accomplish in perpetrating said violence. The film dodges all the questions, making it difficult to invest in any of the danger.
The film blindly heads from point A to point Z. After some fairly compelling buildup, the movie tumbles into illogic as it barrels towards a foregone conclusion. As soon as the dead actually start coming to life, whatever was established about the characters in the first act just doesn’t matter anymore. To the film, they are pretty much nothing but interchangeable victims. The film doesn’t even come up with any interesting ways to kill off the characters, and it fails to construct compelling scares. Its main trick is just turning off the lights and having the threat pop up in random places.
Nothing is thought through very well. The film just throws in whatever it can think to extend the runtime a little bit. There is an unwelcome metaphysical interlude that doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. Its threat is shown to be nearly omnipotent, but it doesn’t seem to be in much of a hurry to accomplish its vague goals, keeping the characters alive even though they have no means of really fighting back. Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde do strong work in building these characters and their relationship in the first, but the actors are squandered as the film rushes headlong into generic horror territory.
The Lazarus Effect is interesting for just a little while. The first act is pretty solid all in all, the film quickly establishing the dynamic of the team, and setting up emotional components to the narrative that could have been capitalized on in the back half of the story. But the film squanders all of that. As soon as the horror kicks in, the movie seems to go on autopilot. Its characters stop being interesting people. They just become bodies to be served up to the generic horror machine. The film is all about bringing things back to life, but the opposite process is what’s on display.
My Rating:
