![]() ![]() Both Duplass and Wilde are engaging and likeable, sharing a great sense of chemistry between them and do an excellent job of giving the sci-fi story much of the heart it needs in order to make us care about what’s happening to their characters. The performances in The Lazarus Effect are strong across the board. That may have been due to budgetary constraints but with some of the kills being a bit nasty (the nastiness being implied, that is), I would have loved to see more of them throughout the film’s final two acts. That being said, while the scares are effective, I’d say they were pretty mild in the violence department with Gelb leaving some of the more dire moments in the film to viewers’ imaginations. The film’s pacing is tight, the story never lags and once all hell breaks loose, Gelb keeps the tension levels nicely elevated until the finale (a moment that feels like a fun B-movie throwback). Meant to be used as a tool to assist in medical emergencies, Frank, Zoe, and their team start running clinical trials of it on animals in hope of perfecting the drug, a decision that’s against the terms of their funding. The lab is subsequently shut down and, in a last ditch effort to save their work, the team reunites for one last experiment that not only costs Zoe her life, but ultimately has deadly consequences for all after she’s revived via the experimental serum and isn’t quite feeling ‘herself’ after her return.įor a genre first-timer, director David Gelb does an admirable job with The Lazarus Effect. In The Lazarus Effect, we meet a research team, headed by Frank (Mark Duplass) and Zoe (Olivia Wilde), who have made a recent breakthrough on their Lazarus Serum- a concoction that can bring the dead back to life. And rather than just exploring the devastatingly immediate effects of pushing the boundaries of science, like many of its predecessors, The Lazarus Effect puts a really interesting twist on the sci-fi/horror mash-up by finding a way to quietly examine the ideals of faith and the repercussions of our actions without ever getting too heavy-handed about it. ![]() While it fits perfectly into the wheelhouse of other films I enjoy from that same sub-genre ( The Fly, Flatliners, Re-Animator and to a certain degree, Pet Semetery), it does a nice job of blazing its own path along the way. These days, you generally don’t see too many “science gone amok” stories (especially theatrically), which made The Lazarus Effect such a refreshing experience. ![]()
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