“The Lazarus Effect,” a new low-budget thriller starring Olivia Wilde and Mark Duplass, is about giving people a second chance. A new serum formulated by a group of young, good-looking geniuses prolongs the time after death that doctors can continue to safely try and revive patients. But, as always, when you trifle with the natural order of things there are unexpected consequences. “If we are going to be asking big questions we have to be ready for the answers,” says Zoe (Wilde), who, as it turns out, wasn’t as prepared for the answers as she thought.
Liberally borrowing from “Frankenstein’s” playing God cautionary tale, “The Lazarus Effect” sees researchers Zoe, Frank (Duplass) and Niko (Donald Glover) create a formula that defies death, bringing deceased animals back to life. (“What if we ripped him from doggie heaven?” wonders Zoe, weighing the ethics of reviving the dearly departed.) The mutts come back a little more ornery than they were the first time they were alive, but a trial run or two are successful enough that big pharma swoops in and steals their idea. In a last ditch attempt to prove their ownership over the serum they secretly do one final test but when the experiment goes awry they are forced to do an unscheduled human run with horrifying results. For such smart people they sure do a lot of stupid things.
“The Lazarus Effect” is the latest shocker from Blumhouse Productions, the folks responsible for the low-fi thrills of “Paranormal Activity,” “Sinister” and “Oculus.” They value atmosphere over actual horror, using shadows and jump scares to get pulses racing. Sometimes it’s very effective—“Insidious” leaves viewers with an icky unease that’s hard to shake—but just as often they fall flat.
“The Lazarus Effect,” clocking in at an economical 75 minutes, crams a lot into its scant running time, but fails to fully develop any of its ideas. It’s alive with Frankenstein references, but where old Frankenstein lumbered around, mostly meaning well when he wasn’t throwing little girls into lakes and being menaced by angry villagers, the recently deceased here flits around maniacally. They (THERE WILL BE NO SPOILERS HERE) have high brain activity, can read minds and move things telepathically, which you’d think would be pretty cool, but their new talents only appear to make them angry. Combine that with an undeveloped religion vs. science subplot that finds our undead reliving the most traumatic moment of their lives over and over again and you’re left with bits and pieces of a story that are never stitched together to form a whole.
“The Lazarus Effect” has some corny lines—“Did I just die?”—a few unintentionally funny moments—the human comes back to life covered in a white sheet, like a kid’s ghost costume—and atmosphere to burn. What it doesn’t have is the sense of fun necessary to pull off the cheesy moments or the scares to sell it as a full-blown horror story.
There are things about Daniel Radcliffe that you probably already know.
Thanks to the Harry Potter series he’s one of the most recognizable actors on earth. He is 5’5” tall, a published poet and is the youngest person, other than royalty, to be honoured with a portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
Here’s what you don’t know. He’s also remarkably reliable. In 10 years of shooting the Potter pictures, he only missed two days — and he’s polite.
For this interview he turned up early (when was the last time an international superstar was on time?) and greets your reporter with a hearty, “What a lovely surprise.”
He offers to help with my crossword — “I’m one of those people in life who probably really annoys serious crossword doers. I’m one of those people who comes up behind and goes, ‘That one you’re about to get? I’ve got it’” — and apologizes when he almost lets a curse slip.
He is not your typical superstar and his new romance, The F Word, is not a typical rom-com.
The 25-year-old actor says the story of a young man hopelessly in love with his best friend (Zoe Kazan) “has things a lot of films want, that combination of being sarcastic and quick and funny without being negative or cynical.”
“Zoe says a great thing,” he says of co-star Kazan.
“She talks about how in most romantic comedies the people meet and then there’s a getting-to-know-you montage, then they do whatever they’re going to do for the rest of the film. Our movie is basically that montage expanded to feature length, and that is what is so joyous about it. Those moments when you are getting to know someone and flirting with them, making them laugh, are so intimate and so exciting and so charged that as an audience it is wonderful to be allowed in to watch that and live through it again.”
Playing the lovesick romantic lead is something different for Radcliffe, who says he wants “to try my hand at as many things as possible.”
Since the final Potter film in 2011, he has appeared in everything from the beatnik drama Kill Your Darlings to the fantasy film Horns and will soon be seen as Igor in a new version of Frankenstein.
“Having played one character for a very long time,” he says, “that builds up in you a desire to play a number of different characters and do as much different work as you can. I want to show as many different sides of my ability as I can. Also I like that you can’t predict what my next thing is going to be.”
“I Origins” is many things. It’s a love story, a sci fi spiritual mystery with a hint of “Frankenstein” thrown in.
Michael Pitt stars as Dr. Ian Grey, a molecular biologist specializing in the evolution of the eye. He’s an atheist, a scientist trying to disprove the idea of intelligent design by creating, from scratch, an eye in a sightless creature. Two women in his life represent the polar opposites of his existence, the sensual, exotic Sophia (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey) and his lab partner, scientist Karen (Brit Marling). A strange discovery brings both his worlds together, the scientific and the spiritual, but is it a random event or a sign that there is more to iris biometrics than hard data and research?
Director Mike Cahill’s last film, “Another Earth,” was a low-fi, sci fi film that valued ideas over the kind of razzmatazz we’ve come to associate with speculative fiction. The same goes with “I Origins.” It’s a small movie about big ideas. Are the eyes a mechanical device or truly a window to the soul? Can science be used to prove or disprove the presence of God? Can faith and science live side-by-side (Hello Mary Shelly!)?
In that sense the movie is a cypher, which is OK, people have been arguing about these concepts for as long as there have been bibles and test tubes, but while “I Origins” is ambitious in its tackling of life’s great mysteries, the story occasionally goes off track. There are some awkward moents that get on the way of smooth storytelling but overall Cahill keeps things chugging along with sheer audacious and ambitious filmmaking.
Pitt, Marling and Bergès-Frisbey hand in magnetic performances that deepen as the film goes on. With this much metaphysics in the air the actors need to ground the story in humanity and they do.
By the time the end credits roll (and stay through the to the very end for a surprise and surprising scene) the metaphysical love story may have asked many more questions than it could ever hope to answer but answers aren’t the point of the film. Ideas are, and the film has those in spades.
They grow up so quickly, don’t they? One day they are slimy bipedal creatures who look like a cross between Yul Brenner and a slug, the next they are flesh eating, underwater breathing alien looking supermodel types. At least that’s the way it is in “Splice,” a new sci fi thriller starring Sarah Polley and Oscar winner Adrien Brody, about a creature who goes from newborn to troubled teen in a matter of weeks.
Clive (Brody) and Elsa (Polley) are bio chemists (and boyfriend and girlfriend) who develop a splicing technology which binds the DNA from multiple animals to create new life and, possibly, cures for everything from Parkinson’s to cancer. It’s the medical breakthrough of the century. The next logical step is to fuse human and animal DNA but despite their success in the lab, their employers, the evil conglomerate Newstead Pharma, is wary of the publicity such a radical step would incur. Secretly the pair go rogue, continue their experiments, and give “birth” to a new life form they dub Dren (that’s “nerd” backwards), a tailed creature resembling a bald dinosaur. Clive, conflicted by the ethical and moral issues of cloning, wants to kill the creature but Elsa won’t have it. “Human cloning is illegal,” she says, “but this won’t be entirely human.” Dren develops at a rapid pace, changing from unrecognizable organism to something akin to a humanoid kangaroo. Soon though problems arise. The creature becomes Daddy’s little… whatever, leaving Elsa to deal with Dren’s difficult puberty.
Like the hybrid creature at the center of the action “Splice” is a cross of genres—part b-movie sci fi and part body horror à la David Cronenberg. Liberally mixing “The Island of Dr. Moreau,” “Frankenstein” and “The Brood,” “Splice” examines ideas of life and death, of playing God, of what is human (and what is not) and even touches on Woody Allen style relationships. There are plenty of moral concepts to chew on, many ruminations to be had on what it is to be human, but only if you look past the b-movie thrills director Vincenzo Natali slathers on with a trowel.
Splice goes places that bigger budget science fiction wouldn’t dare to tread. This isn’t the enviro-friendly sci fi of James Cameron or the space opera of George Lucas. No, this has more in common with the exploitation films of Roger Corman. There’s an icky creature, some scientist sexy time and loads of crazy science. Corman might not have been as successful at layering in the love, jealousy and real human emotions Natali heaps on his characters but I think the b-movie king would approve of “Splice’s” overall tone. It’s doesn’t skimp on the blood and guts but it’s funnier than you think it is going to be, wilder than expected—Sarah Polley’s maternal instincts towards Dren are right out of “Mommie Dearest”—and takes several unexpected twists and turns.
“Splice” is giddy good fun, the rare sci fi flick that revels in its b-movie roots while also offering up something to think about over a beaker of coffee afterward.
