Horror Channel Frightfest review: Realive

Set 70 years in the future, Realive aims to offer a modern twist on Frankenstein. When Marc Jarvis (Tom Hughes – I Am Soldier) is diagnosed with terminal cancer he chooses to commit suicide rather than endure a year of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, then cryogenically freeze himself, ready to be reanimated sometime in the future when his cancer his curable.

From screenwriter Mateo Gil (Vanilla Sky), the film questions what it really means to be alive, is it a beating heart and consciousness or is it how you live your life.

Seventy years after he is frozen, Marc is woken in a sterile lab as part of Project Lazarus – the first human to be successfully brought back to life after being frozen.

Attached to an umbilical cord monitoring his every breath, Marc readjusts to his new life, learning to walk and function again. Realising the future isn’t quite what he hoped it would be and left without family or friends, he questions whether or not he made the right decision.

Left without his soul mate Naomi, who cryogenically froze herself years later, Marc ends up killing himself for a second time, but with a twist at the end which makes me think they could head for a sequel – which will obviously be worse than the original.

Aside from Marc reliving his memories of his former life 70 years prior, the entire film is set in a sterile, white lab packed with modern technology.

Perhaps if the film had expanded beyond the walls of the lab the whole thing could have been improved. Packing the cast into one space made the film quite boring and the only real plot was ‘Man frozen. Man brought back to life. Man sad’ despite several forced Frankenstein references.

The cast itself is faultless. Along with Hughes, Oona Chaplin (Quantum of Solace), Charlotte Le Bon (Bastille Day) and Barry Ward (Pursuit) are all brilliant, but they aren’t given much to work with. Forced to stay within four walls for 99% of the film, there’s not a lot for them to play around with and the whole film feels claustrophobic, despite having an estimated budget of $7,000,000 – according to IMDB that is.

While an interesting but overdone concept, the film ends up being dull. I wanted to see Marc pushed into the outside world to see how he responded “in real life”, not sat in a weird floating bed for most of the film. There seems no desire on his part to go outside, so while we could have seen the full extent of writer Gil’s vision of the future it just wasn’t an option, which left viewers sat there for almost two hours visibly bored. Realive could have been better trimmed down, or potentially a really interesting take on Frankenstein, had Gil expanded the scenery and the world beyond a lab.

As it stands the film just isn’t worth paying to watch.