The Lazarus Effect (2015)

The Lazarus Effect arrives with the grim tidiness of a Blumhouse chiller that knows exactly how long it can hold a room. An 83-minute runtime, a modest budget, and a premise borrowed from Mary Shelley by way of a university lab. David Gelb, better known for documenting sushi, directs with a steady hand and no particular appetite for ideas. The result is competent, brief, and entirely uninterested in the cultural conversations that were already underway around it in 2015. It wants to frighten you and then get out of the way, and it mostly succeeds at the second part.

The cast is more diverse than the genre typically bothers with, and the film deserves a small nod for simply not making a fuss about it. Donald Glover and Sean T. Krishnan move through the research team as colleagues, not symbols. Olivia Wilde holds the center as a scientist with a fiance and a hypothesis, though the screenplay wastes little time converting her into a telekinetic nightmare, which tends to complicate any reading of the material as a statement on women in science. A pharmaceutical company absorbs the team's funding and confiscates their work, offering a faint corporate-villain shrug before the plot moves on to flying furniture. That thread is never pulled.

What remains is a possession story with an e-cigarette and a dog. No sermons, no causes, no lessons. The film trades in jump scares and loud crescendos, and critics were unimpressed, though audiences kept it profitable. We are left with a lean genre exercise that scores low on social consciousness not out of hostility, but out of complete disinterest. Refreshing, in its way. Empty, in most others.