Flatliners

This is a movie where I can’t really pretend that I take the premise seriously for a single second.  While I do have a personal belief in the afterlife, I do not think near-death experiences are evidence for it.  If such evidence existed it could only be presented by contact with spirits of those who are definitely dead, not the memories of those who were close.  Even if their experiences were completely valid, the afterlife might very well last five minutes rather than an eternity for all we can tell.

Beyond that, I’ll never understand what Medical Student Nelson Wright (Kiefer Sutherland) thinks he’s proving in this story.  The plan he forms with his fellow students is to stop their hearts, revive themselves, and record what they experience.  I don’t see anything about this experience that makes them especially different from the numerous other near-death experiences.

The closest the movie comes to scientific objectivity is when Dave Labraccio (Kevin Bacon) undergoes the experiment assuming that, as an atheist, he would experience nothing unless there was an afterlife.  This completely disregards the fact that he was raised in a culture of religion.  It also disregards the possibility he himself raised: the brain might release some hormone at the point of death to calm the dying individual

I don’t say all of this as a negative.  The fact that the movie isn’t scientific frames how I view it.  I approach this movie as pure 80s cheese not that far removed from Re-Animator (never mind that it was made in 1990).  From that perspective, this movie is pitch-perfect.  Kiefer Sutherland gives a stylized performance that’s brilliantly over-the-top in his utter narcissism.

Nelson is backed up in his insane endeavor by Rachel Manus (Julia Roberts), who doesn’t look like she’s missed a second of sleep through medical school, the aforementioned Dave Labraccio, and resident womanizer Joe Hurley (William Badlwin).  The group is rounded out by Oliver Platt as Randy Steckle, who takes very little part in the actual flatlining, but sticks around to tell the others that they’re insane, and provide some assistance with reviving them.

 Being a movie, of course, things must actually happen in response to this experiment.  Things that, for some reason, have never happened to anyone experiencing near death experiences before.  Rather than simply seeing glimpses of a supposed afterlife, the med students being to have visions of their past sins haunting them.  Dave, for example, begins seeing visions of a little girl he picked on when he was a child.  Joe sees visions of women he filmed without their knowledge.  Rachael’s “sin” was rewritten to avoid tarnishing Julia Robert’s image, so she still struggles with guilt concerning the suicide of her father.

Interestingly, the movie would be very different if it was limited to those three scenarios.  Both Dave and Joe are “haunted” by the “ghosts” of people who are clearly still alive, and Rachel did nothing wrong.  In and of itself, even as cheesy as the whole premise is, these three stories could be taken as purely psychological horror.  Near the point of death these three people faced their own demons.

But, naturally, the 80s couldn’t be that subtle.  So, Nelson finds himself face-to-face with the physical ghost of his childhood dog, and a kid (Joshua Rudoy) whose death he was accidentally responsible for.  This ghost child is able to physically beat up an adult Kiefer Sutherland, because of course he is.

In terms of horror, Nelson is almost in another movie.  Not to say that it isn’t cheesy throughout, but there’s a difference between being tormented by visions of past wrongs, and a cut 20-something being spat on by a small child who just overpowered him.  Furthermore, unlike the others who ultimately share emotional moments in which they deal with their sins, Nelson never calms down enough to really give a sense of closure.  While the movie does use one scene to establish the possibility that Nelson is engaging in self-harm and imagining a child doing it, I don’t think Nelson has a single scene in which he deals with his own wrongs in anything other than a blind panic.

Eventually, Nelson tries to reconcile with the demons of his past by flatlining with no one else present.  After apparent “death” he’s apparently forgiven by the ghost of his childhood enemy, and returns to the land of the living for a happy ending.  It’s exactly the blend of cheese this movie needed.
If you haven’t seen Flatliners, you’re missing out.  You won’t be scared, but it’s a fun movie.