Dead on arrival

Is there a maximum number of times during a movie you must look away before you feel you should have stayed away? If so, the new film Flatliners likely hits it. How strongly should a film’s redemptive lessons compete with its suggestive elements to recommend it? Whatever that threshold is, Flatliners doesn’t reach it. But somewhere below the din of the film’s Hollywood spectacle, a few moments faintly ring true.

Flatliners the remake doesn’t stray far from the plot of the original. Each (except one) of five medical-student friends—a more ethnically diverse bunch than the leading cast of the 1990 hit starring Kiefer Sutherland et al.—takes a turn undergoing a near-death experience. Courtney (a standout Ellen Page) volunteers first. Her friends stop her heart (producing a flat line on the electrocardiogram she’s connected to), perform a brain scan, and revive her after a few minutes. Courtney reports out-of-body adventures, and in the days that follow she achieves heightened academic performance—a motivating factor for the others to follow in her footsteps.

The “flatliners” experience another side effect: the onset of images of someone from their past whom they’ve wronged. Courtney sees her little sister, whom she accidentally killed nine years earlier while texting and driving. Jamie (James Norton) had conceived a child with his girlfriend but abandoned the woman on the day of her scheduled abortion. Not only does the ex-girlfriend materialize out of nowhere, but also he hears a baby crying.

Do these visions represent hauntings or hallucinations brought on by harbored guilt? The second half of the film morphs into a horror flick with spine-tingling appearances of these mysterious images. (Sutherland, returning in a cameo role as a medical school professor, provides a different sort of shock—a shock of white hair that along with dark-rimmed glasses and white coat give him the farcical appearance of a clean-shaven Kentucky Fried Chicken pitchman.)

The film’s disturbing material begins well before the phantasmic forms arrive, though. The five friends celebrate each escape from death with alcohol-fueled partying, leading to scenes of sex: Flatliners (rated PG-13 for violence, terror, sexual content, language, thematic material, and some drug use) glamorously bundles boozing, hook-up culture, and the dangerously false notion that we hold our lives in our own hands. Distracted viewers, especially the target young-adult audience, might miss the film’s valuable takeaways.

In a flashback scene, as the car she was driving sinks into a lake, Courtney, who has escaped it and surfaced, screams in desperation for help as her little sister drowns. This powerful depiction of the horror of being responsible for a loved one’s death should steer habitually distracted drivers toward cellular sobriety. Sadly, a pro-life strand and a lesson in the blessing of admitting one’s wrongdoing will also likely be lost to the film’s glitzy sensuality.