'Lazareth' arrives on Netflix Aug. 9. - A Beautifully Guarded World Begins to Crack

 

Review: 

‘Lazareth’ A Beautifully Guarded World Begins to Crack

Ashley Judd anchors Alec Tibaldi’s intimate pandemic thriller, in which a remote woodland sanctuary becomes both refuge and prison.

Something is unsettling about a beautiful place that has been chosen because the rest of the world is no longer safe.

In “Lazareth,” the writer-director Alec Tibaldi repeatedly carries his camera above the trees, offering aerial views of a remote cabin swallowed by an immense, dark forest. The images are gorgeous, but they are not merely decorative. They establish the film’s central contradiction. The wilderness surrounding the house is vast enough to suggest freedom, yet dense enough to function as a wall. This is where Lee, played with steely conviction by Ashley Judd, has brought her two orphaned nieces to survive. It is their home, their fortress and, increasingly, their prison.

A deadly pandemic has killed the girls’ parents and transformed the outside world into a place Lee describes as infectious and violent. She adopts Maeve and Imogen, raises them in the woods and teaches them that survival depends upon discipline: Never leave the property. Avoid outsiders. Trust no one beyond the family.

More than a decade later, Maeve, played by Sarah Pidgeon, and Imogen, played by Katie Douglas, have grown into young women without ever fully entering the world beyond the trees. Lee alone ventures into town for supplies. When she returns, the girls carefully disinfect her, performing a ritual that is practical, intimate and faintly religious. Every gesture reinforces the family mythology Lee has constructed around them: Lazareth is safe. Everything outside it is contaminated.

At a lean 86 minutes, the film moves briskly without sacrificing its atmosphere. Tibaldi understands that suspense does not always require noise or constant movement. Sometimes it begins with a rule repeated so often that its authority is no longer questioned. The screenplay is carefully constructed around the gradual destabilization of Lee’s rules, allowing doubt to enter the cabin almost imperceptibly before it takes physical form.

That form is Owen, played by Asher Angel, an injured young man Maeve discovers in the woods. Bringing him inside is an act of compassion, but in Lee’s closed system, compassion can also be a breach. His arrival introduces an unfamiliar presence into a household governed by repetition, obedience and a highly controlled understanding of the world.

Owen does more than threaten the family’s physical safety. He represents knowledge Lee cannot regulate. Through him, Maeve and Imogen begin to recognize how little they know about the life from which they have been protected. Their questions become more dangerous than any possible infection because they challenge the foundation of Lee’s power.

Judd gives the film its emotional gravity. Lee could have been played as a conventional authoritarian survivalist, but Judd makes her more complicated. Her severity is inseparable from her fear, and her control grows from a promise she made when the girls were children: that she would keep them alive. The performance never allows us to forget that Lee believes she is acting out of love, even as that love becomes possessive, inflexible, and destructive.

Pidgeon and Douglas give distinct shape to young women who have been raised inside the same sealed environment. Their performances convey both the closeness between the sisters and the subtle differences in how each begins to respond to Owen and to Lee’s increasingly fragile authority. Angel, meanwhile, brings an essential uncertainty to the story. Owen is vulnerable enough to invite sympathy, yet his presence carries questions the film is careful not to answer too quickly.

The post-apocalyptic survival story is hardly unfamiliar territory. Cinema has given us countless families hiding from viruses, creatures, invaders and unnamed catastrophes. Tibaldi does not attempt to disguise the genre’s familiar architecture. Instead, he turns inward, using it to examine a smaller and more psychologically charged question: What happens when protection becomes indistinguishable from control?

Tibaldi began writing “Lazareth” before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the film inevitably carries echoes of the years in which isolation, contamination and fear became part of ordinary life. Yet it does not operate primarily as pandemic commentary. Its concerns are more elemental: the stories families create to protect themselves, the authority those stories give to the people who tell them and the painful consequences of discovering that safety may have been built upon fear.

The cinematography is especially effective in expressing those ideas. The aerial shots place the cabin within an ocean of trees, making the characters appear almost impossibly small. From above, Lazareth seems protected by the forest. From within, the same forest feels watchful and impenetrable. Its darkness keeps danger away, but it also prevents those inside from seeing beyond it.

That tension gives “Lazareth” its visual and emotional force. The film is well acted, intelligently structured, and strikingly photographed. Its beauty is never separate from its menace. 

Each tranquil image contains the possibility that the sanctuary Lee has spent years defending may no longer be able to withstand the truth.

“Lazareth” arrives on Netflix Aug. 9.