Movie Review: The Lazarus Effect

Check do-not-resuscitate on derivative horror.

Review by Brandon Wolfe

“Sometimes dead is better,” gravely intoned old Jud Crandall in Pet Sematary, but characters in horror movies (including Jud’s own) never heed that warning. Playing God is too irresistible a prospect, especially when a loved one falls. No, to horror movie characters, dead is worse, until they discover, as they inevitably do, that there’s always something worse than death. Something beyond death. Something beyond human comprehension. Then the realization hits, always far too late, that dead? Sometimes better.

This is the object lesson learned the hard way by the university-based researchers in The Lazarus Effect. Engaged scientists Frank and Zoe (Mark Duplass and Olivia Wilde) have been developing a serum designed to temporarily revive flatlining patients in order to extend the window of opportunity for a surgeon to save them. Aided by lab assistants Niko (Community’s Donald Glover) and Clay (Evan Peters, Quicksilver from X-Men: Days of Future Past), and documented by camerawoman Eva (Sarah Bolger from Once Upon a Time), Frank and Zoe struggle to make their serum work for more than just a few seconds (as it does on a dead pig in the film’s found-footage-flavored opening scene). One day, after a surprisingly lucid suggestion from a stoned Clay, the group manages to fully revive a deceased dog, which returns to life so good-as-new that it no longer even has the extreme cataracts it had upon death. But the dog, of course, came back wrong, and exhibits unsettling (yet kind of funny) behavior, such as engaging in eerie staring contests and, most remarkably, raiding the fridge on its own.

The team’s big breakthrough hits a wall, however, when the corporation that extended grant money to Frank steps in and co-opts all the research material in a bid to cut the group off from credit for their own work. Desperate to retain autonomy over his passion project, Frank gathers the team to infiltrate the lab illicitly and recreate their experiment’s success in front of Eva’s camera to get ahead of the corporation going public with the research. But the plan runs into a snag when Zoe is abruptly electrocuted to death mid-procedure. Looking at his dead fiancé lying on the ground and knowing that he has a batch of anti-death serum in his hot little hand, Frank decides that his work is about to get its unscheduled first human trial. The procedure is a success and Zoe is back up on her feet soon enough, but the person who comes back isn’t the same Zoe as before. They never are. Definitely one of those times where dead is better.

The Lazarus Effect is essentially a hodgepodge of creaky horror tropes cobbled together, even if the pieces being cobbled don’t fit together organically. Obviously the film owes a huge debt to Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners, of which it has literally the exact same premise, and there’s some of the aforementioned Pet Sematary in there as well for good measure, but the film dips its toe into a number of other sources as it goes along and the whole thing begins to seem jumbled. When Zoe initially returns, she claims that she spent her time gone (which she recounts as years, even though it was just minutes to the team) in Hell, which she claims is the ceaseless endurance of the worst moment from a person’s life (amusingly, this is also the concept of Hell presented in Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey), in Zoe’s case, a fire she witnessed as a child that claimed the lives of her neighbors. But Zoe carries this vision of torment back to the real world somehow, and she’s able to trap Eva in her fiery nightmare scenario as well, leaving the girl with a hand-shaped burn mark as proof of her experience. So now we’re in Nightmare on Elm Street territory as well. As if the pool of references weren’t already getting a bit crowded (and that’s not even taking into account the blatant Frankenstein motif recurring all throughout), Zoe begins killing her colleagues off telekinetically, Carrie-style.

The film’s stubborn resistance to pin down the rules that govern its premise grows frustrating. It’s never clear exactly what Zoe is supposed to be. Is she possessed or a corrupted version of herself? Is she a tormented victim or an eager participant in her carnage? What does she want or hope to achieve? What is the nature of her powers? The Lazarus Effect seems to want to keep its options open, taking all available pathways indiscriminately. The film is skillfully made, but far too reliant on hoary horror tricks (hope you like jump-scares because they’re on the menu). Far too much of the film feels aggravatingly familiar, both visually and conceptually.

I’ll say this - for such a low-rent piffle, The Lazarus Effect has somehow managed to accumulate an impressive roster of actors, though it proceeds to waste their talents uniformly. The ubiquitous Duplass isn’t afforded the opportunity to make Frank anything more than a hapless schmoe. The character isn’t allowed to emerge as obsessive or driven mad by grief or hubris. He’s just kind of there. Peters, who stole the whole show out from under a lot of major talents in X-Men, makes little impression here as an ostensibly funny pothead. Most baffling of all is Glover, a profoundly gifted comedic actor stuck in a stock, personality-scrubbed horror-victim role (and, given Glover’s ethnicity, a shiny nickel to anyone who guesses who dies first). This guy walked away from Community to do stuff like this?

The sole cast member to make an impression is Wilde, who isn’t necessarily any better served by the film than anyone else, but who cuts an admirably creepy horror figure. Wilde’s facial features, striking and attractive in most contexts, are repurposed here for maximum chilling effect. Her slight gauntness and severe bone structure take on an otherworldly visage when she turns into…whatever it is that Zoe turns into.

But it’s not enough to save The Lazarus Effect from its derivative ordinariness. The film is a grab-bag of things we’ve seen in other, better movies many, many times before. The film has a sequel setup that hammers the Frankenstein homage home, but it’s hard to walk out of the theater wanting more. This film’s franchise prospects should be left for dead. Sometimes that’s better.

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