#THE LAZARUS EFFECT CAST TRIAL#

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. Official plot version from relativitymedia.These days, you generally don’t see too many “science gone amok” stories (especially theatrically), which made The Lazarus Effect such a refreshing experience. They are no longer faced with the question of whether they can bring someone back to life- but rather, the wrath of her return. As her strange new persona reveals itself, the team quickly becomes stuck in a gruesome reality. Initially, the procedure appears a success, but the team soon realizes something is wrong with Zoe. Fueled by terror and grief, Frank pushes them to do the unthinkable: attempt to resurrect their first human test subject. When the dean of their university learns of their underground experiments, their project is unexpectedly shut down and their materials confiscated.įrank, Zoe and their team (Donald Glover, Sarah Bolger and Evan Peters) take matters into their own hands, launching a rogue attempt to recreate their experiment, during which things go terribly wrong and one of their own, Zoe, is horrifically killed.

#THE LAZARUS EFFECT CAST TRIAL#

After a successful, yet unsanctioned, trial on a newly deceased animal, the team is ready to unveil their breakthrough to the world. The Lazarus Effect follows a group of researchers led by Frank (Mark Duplass) and his fiancée Zoe (Olivia Wilde,) who've achieved the unimaginable- bringing the dead back to life.

The lazarus effect cast