Honestly, I hardly noticed the absence – the best horror is built on psychology, not blood. There’s a hint of body horror and some trickles of blood but Lazarus uses some visual shortcuts to imply what you’ve seen in gorier horror movies. The rest of the cast – including comedian/rap artist Donald Glover – is charming, but isn’t the best fit for this film. Instead, it comes across as two actors hauling the quality of the movie in two very different directions. The interplay between Wilde and Duplass should create the dynamic of two scientists jousting over ideas (she believes in an afterlife, he doesn’t) and uncomfortably struggling to fit their philosophical disagreements into their more intimate relationship. He’s been good in a lot of indie comedies, especially Safety Not Guaranteed, but he makes some very bad choices here. He plays the experiment’s co-leader and Wilde’s boyfriend. Unfortunately, and I hate to drag an actor out like this, Mark Duplass is awful. She shines in these moments and gives us the only character who really feels like she belongs in that lab. She is extraordinarily good in a role that requires her to play across the board – she can recite the technical babble behind her experiment like she’s on another episode of House, but there’s a later sequence in which she changes personalities depending on who’s in the room with her. Lazarus can scare you, sure, but it won’t get inside your head. They can make us jump, but they can’t lurk in the back of our minds and send chills up our spines. Predictable scares can still be frightening, but they don’t hold the same power in our psyche. Prediction means we could time every scare’s arrival on a stopwatch. Often it happens when the audience sees something the characters can’t. Anticipation means we know they’re coming, we just can’t be sure of when. This means we can’t anticipate the scares, but we can predict them. Lazarus relies almost entirely on jump scares, where something jumps at a character from off-screen accompanied by a loud noise. There are some major issues in the shot choices and editing, which are both crucial in creating mood and rhythm for your scares to inhabit. Also, Hell lends you superpowers for reasons nobody ever figures out. The only problem is that a few minutes of death here equals years and years in Hell. Inevitably, there’s an accidental death that forces our heroes to bring a human (Olivia Wilde) back to life instead. Scientists are playing god by attempting to bring dead animals back to life. The Lazarus Effect is very effective some of the time, but it’s interrupted by ferocious bouts of quirkiness. Some truly bad movies still have the ability to scare us. We don’t always watch horror looking for good cinema, we watch it for effective scares.
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