- The Lazarus Effect
A thirtysomething couple, partners in work as well as life, are coming apart. They’ve been engaged for three years, but he keeps putting off the wedding, using their professional commitments as an excuse. She, on the other hand, desires a confirmation of their bond, and she can feel herself turning sour the longer she waits for it. Maybe it’s her Catholic upbringing that makes her feel this way or else some psychological need for certainty—she is a scientist, after all. But then, so is he. Why isn’t he more sympathetic to how she’s feeling? Sometimes she suspects that their work is all he really cares about. He doesn’t express even a twinge of jealousy when she jokes around with a former boyfriend who’s a member of their research team.
These issues converge in the movie’s second half, when the hero recklessly uses the serum on the heroine after she dies in a lab accident. She returns to life, but she doesn’t seem the same as before. She acts more and more strangely, causing the other scientists to wonder if her soul may have been corrupted by something from beyond the grave. Were The Lazarus Effect a better movie, this turn would register as a metaphor for the shocking discovery you no longer relate to someone whom you’ve known intimately for some time. We’d realize that the hero isn’t frightened by his partner’s change in behavior, but by the suspicion that he never understood her at all.
