Director/Screenplay – Alec Tibaldi, Producers – Robert Ogden Barnum & Eric Binns, Photography – Martim Vian, Music – Idem, Visual Effects – Sturdy Bird (Supervisor – Michael Colarik), Special Effects Supervisors – Chris Coleman & Conor Wing, Production Design – Sean Roney. Production Company –Vertical/Barnum Picture Company.
Ashley Judd (Lee), Sarah Pidgeon (Maeve), Katie Douglas (Imogen), Asher Angel (Owen), Edward Balaban (Morian), Kyle Brown (Jay)
A deadly virus has caused civilisation to collapse. In the Pacific Northwest, Lee and her two daughters Maeve and Imogen have for the last ten years made a refuge at a house in the woods that they call Lazareth. The two now teenage girls come across the wounded Owen in the woods. They insist on dragging Owen back to the house to sew up his wound. When Lee objects, the girls outvote her and they agree to allow Owen to stay until he is well enough to go. However, a gang of youths come searching for Owen and raid the house and take their supplies. With the girls varyingly attracted to and hating Owen, this splits the house into sides.
Lazareth was the third film for Australian director Alec Tibaldi who had previously made the non-genre likes of Spiral Farm (2019) and The Daphne Project (2021).
Like a number of films that came out during the Covid-19 pandemic, Lazareth is set following an unspecified pandemic that has caused the collapse of civilisation. Several films made during this period saw the Covid pandemic stretching well into the future with the likes of Anthropocene (2020), Breakdown (2020), Songbird (2020), 2025: The World Enslaved by a Virus (2021) and The Survivalist (2021). (For a more detailed listing see Films About Plague and Pandemic). The pandemic here is not Covid but the film clearly draws on the imagery of the pandemic with people in quarantine and going out wearing N95 masks.
In particular, the films Lazareth most resembles are works like Glasshouse (2021), or perhaps pre-Covid films such as The Survivalist (2015), Z for Zachariah (2015) and It Comes at Night (2017), which are centred around people in an isolated enclave who suddenly have to open their doors to grant shelter to those from outside and all the attendant trust issues that come with it. For a time there even seems something of the Clint Eastwood film The Beguiled (1971) – something that also played out in Glasshouse – in the scenes where the wounded stranger (Asher Angel) ends up pitting the household against each other.
Alec Tibaldi creates some reasonable tension. The sequence where the youth gang go marauding through the house and take all their supplies while the girls and Asher Angel are hidden in various places, observing through narrow bands of light from behind walls and unable to do a thing lest they give themselves away is a fine one.
The film also has a very interesting Conceptual Breakthrough twist in mid-film where Sarah Pidgeon sneaks into town in the back of her mother’s truck [PLOT SPOILERS] only to discover that the plague is over and that everybody in the town is back to living life as normal and no longer wearing protective gear. It throws everything in a spin and reveals mother Ashley Judd as a character who has been lying to the girls – although her reasons for doing so are never quite clear, something to do with protecting their sanctuary. She incredibly casually dismisses the deception by telling the Sarah that she is being overprotective on the grounds that viruses can come back.
It is also a twist that the film fails to do much to follow up on – such as showing the girls discovering the wider world or delving into Ashley Judd’s reasons for lying to them. At the very least you would expect a heck of a lot of arguments and accusations in the house. I mean I could easily consider this as a scenario that plays out in some future work of fiction or even real life where a family have isolated in the woods for a decade to get away from the Covid pandemic, switching off all media, unaware or distrusting of any vaccines, and then suddenly discover by chance encounter that the world has recovered. However, such a story would hardly be a work that regards the parents’ actions as heroic and anything other than a sad one about missed opportunities.
Instead, Lazareth settles for an ending that conveniently kills Ashley Judd’s mother off and has the girls and Asher Angel settling down into their home. This is part of what I would accuse of being the film’s failure to raise its stakes in very interesting ways where the ending is simply about the household luring the marauding youths back and killing those responsible where it could have been a film that aimed for a much wider scope, showing their adjustment to the wider world. Compare this to something like the tv series Silo (2023- ), which came out around the same time and is entirely built around breaking through the confines of a hermetically enclosed community to discover what is outside.
Lazareth stars Ashley Judd who was a big name several years ago, but her career seems to have faded somewhat in the 2010s (which may well have been due to being one of the women who rejected Harvey Weinstein). At age 56 when the film comes out, it is a shock seeing her so botoxed that her features resemble those of a cat. The other surprise is seeing Asher Angel who was what seems like only a couple of years earlier was playing Billy Batson in Shazam! (2019) and sequel, now in a grown-up part. The two girls, Sarah Pidgeon and Katie Douglas, both show promise.
Trailer here