Why The Lazarus Project should be your next box set
Review Overview
Concept
8Cast
8Consequences
8Rating
Ivan Radford | On 12, Nov 2023
Season 2 premieres on Wednesday 15th November 2023. This review is based on Season 1 and was originally published in July 2022.
How far would you go to save the ones you love? That’s the question at the heart of The Lazarus Project, a thought-provoking and brilliantly thought-out thriller.
Giri/Haji creator Joe Barton has a knack for taking a high concept and following it through to its logical and emotional end. Here, it’s the discovery by George (Paapa Essiedu), a software engineer, that the world has been reset by several months and he’s reliving the same day again: July 1st. When he meets Archie (the always-excellent Anjli Mohindra), though, he learns that he’s not gone crazy and that time has been turned back by a secret organisation, known as the Lazarus Project. Their mission? To avoid the world from being wiped out. Every time they hit rewind to avoid an extinction event, only the people who have been recruited by the agency are aware that the clock has been reset.
George soon finds himself part of a manhunt to track down Rebrov (Tom Burke), an elusive criminal determined to detonate a nuclear bomb, thereby destroying the world. But things, inevitably, aren’t that clear-cut: Rebrov turns out to be a former Lazarus Project agent who has gone rogue, after the group’s repeated resets led to the reliving of trauma over and over.
George, who has a relationship and new marriage on the table, is all too able to identify with wanting to avoid unnecessary pain. Paapa Essiedu’s heartfelt charisma – plus a natural chemistry with Charly Clive as his partner, Sarah – makes the impact of going back over the same territory more than once heartbreakingly easy to grasp. Anjli Mohindra, meanwhile, perfectly contrasts him as the sarcastic Archie, while Rudi Dharmalingam’s colleague, Shiv, is suitably standoffish and Caroline Quentin’s boss, Wes, is as steely as they come.
As Barton twists the knife tighter with each rewind, the result is a thriller that toys with your sympathies as much as your expectations, throwing questions of right and wrong up in the air alongside questions of life and death, free will and control, and happiness and grief. Powering along at a non-stop pace, with an escalating scope to much the rising personal stakes, the result is a riveting mix of suspenseful set pieces and moral dilemmas in which you’re never quite sure what will happen next.