Laboratory Conditions is a 2018 short film about a physician investigating a missing body that disrupts an unlawful experiment.
I’m going to just come out and say that Jocelyn Stamat‘s latest short film Laboratory Conditions is one of the most intriguing and flat out WTF? films I’ve seen in years. Sporting a stellar and unexpected cast and a brief 15-minute runtime, this jarring little gem of a thriller is devilishly clever and wickedly smart while it smacks you cold, right in the face. This is the good stuff.
With no spoilers, we meet Emma Holloway (Marisa Tomei), an experienced emergency room doctor who checks in on an elderly patient only to find that he’s gone missing in the few minutes that she was away, learning that he might have passed, though her nurses can’t find him. She soon discovers that he’s been clandestinely transported by ambulance to a secret makeshift laboratory, where she walks in on something highly irregular. She meets Dr. Marjorie Cane (Minnie Driver), the head of the research department, who, along with several others are about to conduct a rather strange experiment, one that will hopefully, without exception, prove or disprove the existence of a soul.
Straight away your mind is racing to Flatliners, and with good reason, as there are earmarks to that film (and its lesser reboot) throughout, but deviates plenty to make this something altogether different, and far superior. Playing it legit for the entire run, the film is a short medical exposition on the state of near-death, dying, and possible realities beyond, primarily putting ethics on the chopping block as the two doctors take to extreme positions about the rights of the patient versus the rights of science in understanding what really amounts to the last frontier in the human experience, death, which we are reminded is itself a human defined construct.
Stamat, who is herself a doctor, working with a script by Terry Rossio, peppers the film with great authenticity, the urgency of the dialogue mixing extremely well with the medical jargon, none of it out of reach for the audience, who, admittedly is always breathlessly trying to keep up as it’s clear something isn’t right. I hesitate to use the word sinister, for the lab and the professionals working within are not at all painted as such, even if their actions draw considerable question. The debate and eventual conflict that arises between the doctors is then truly put to the test when matters of science and belief give them very different experiences … and then, well, things get dark. I won’t even hint at the ending, but suffice to say, it’s rock ’em sock ’em, and curiously, ambiguous.
Given its short runtime and pandora’s box mentality … not too mention that cast, there’s a feeling like this is something of a teaser. If there was ever a short film that will flat out have audiences screaming ‘more please’, this is it. Laboratory Conditions is a slick, menacing, extremely well-acted short that is a critical must see.