Flatliners is a 2017 thriller about five medical students, obsessed by what lies beyond the confines of life, who embark on a daring experiment to stop their hearts and triggers a near-death experience.
The flaw in director Niels Arden Oplev‘s remake of the Joel Schumacher film of the same name is its motivation, a problem shared partly with the original. It wants desperately to be a horror film, to use near-death experiences as a vehicle to unleash evil from the great beyond, however, how it does this becomes its weakest link, careening the film into oblivion, but worse, insignificance. What it really ought to have been is a psychological drama where exploration of this undiscovered country leads to existential crisis rather than unwarranted apparitions bound by personal vendettas wrapped loosely around a conceit of guilt. Here’s how it could have worked.
READ MORE: Finding Second Life in Joel Schumacher‘s 1990 Flatliners
First though, here’s the story as it played out. At a prestigious hospital, a talented medical student named Courtney Holmes (Ellen Page) is suffering from the loss of her younger sister Tessa (Madison Brydges), killed years before in a car accident in which Courtney was driving, distracted by her phone. The guilt has greatly burdened her and an odd obsession with the afterlife has consumed her to the point where she asks revived emergency room patients about their own experiences.
In the bowels of the medical center, she discovers a fully-functioning but unused bunker-style treatment facility designed for natural disasters, and decides this is where she can perform a little experiment of her own. Asking fellow students Jamie (James Norton) and Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) to join her for assistance, she aims to stop her heart for sixty seconds and have them save her life using the expensive equipment at their disposal. She’s going to find out if there is life after death.
However, their inexperience proves costly and they panic when it doesn’t work, though Sophie has the wherewithal to call for help in fellow student Ray (Diego Luna) who rushes to the scene and brings Courtney back. Not long after, Marlo (Nina Dobrev) arrives, having followed Ray down and now all five are involved. What’s amazing is that Courtney remembers her time in death, ‘seeing’ herself lifted from her body and going up to the hospital roof where she’s never been before. Of course, the others want in and in succession, with Jamie first, they each – with the exception of Ray – take to flatlining.
Now, what they don’t realize until later is that what they have done is kind of open a portal to damnation of sorts where they each become haunted by a terrible unresolved guilt. Courtney is obviously dealing with Tessa’s death and as such is soon seeing visions of her decaying sister’s corpse, sometimes seeming as if coming to life. Jamie, a relentless womanizer who sleeps around, is visited by a vision of a beautiful young woman whom he realizes is a girl he got pregnant but abandoned. Sophia is tormented by visions of a fellow high school student that she bullied, posting racy images of her online, causing her extreme embarrassment. And finally, Marlo is haunted by a patient she allegedly killed when she mixed up his medications while he was being treated for a jellyfish sting.
All of these are actually well-thought out problems and in fact pretty authentic. While two of them mirror loosely the experiences of the first film, with bullying and sexual misconduct, they are all mostly different enough and make sense to offer hopes for something compelling. The problem is what the film does with them, opting for lazy clichéd ghost encounters than with actual trauma, leaving the whole thing a tepid and empty story. So, how to fix it. (Massive Spoilers Ahead)
Let’s start with guilt. It’s clearly mentioned at the end of the film about the consequences of too much guilt, so yes, that’s understood. Guilt has long been considered a part of stress-related disorders and a major contributing factor in PTSD1. This is an excellent jumping off point for a story and Flatliners is loaded with potential to make this worthwhile.
Look at Courtney. It’s shown in a few flashbacks (one that opens the film) that she and her sister are quite close and that while they are driving, Courtney gets sidetracked by her phone. This causes her to take her eyes off the road for a second, just enough time to miss a blocked bridge, sending her flipping over the guardrail in overcompensation, crashing the car into a river below where Tessa drowns. It’s admittedly harrowing and Courtney is deserving of her sorrow and guilt. However, once she crosses over after flatlining, she begins to see Tessa in slow increments where the young girl eventually becomes a kind of It Follows ghost-demon, hunting her older sister down relentlessly, giving her horrifying hallucinations that slowly close in around Courtney until she is in a perpetual panicked and paranoid state. This leads to Courtney’s ultimate death, and not a controlled flatline death where she can be revived either, but a fall from building fire escape that proves fatal. But why? Why would Tessa want Courtney dead?
Now okay, I understand that Tessa as a demonic vision – she looks like a blonde Japanese horror movie child – is a metaphor for guilt, or at least might be viewed as such for those giving the film a larger benefit of the doubt. Courtney’s guilt is chasing her down and killing her, not Tessa per se, yet as a narrative device, it fails because Tessa herself is never seen as anything by a smiling happy girl who greatly loved her sister. Yet, since the filmmakers are so intent on making a cheap horror movie, they miss the opportunity to give the ghost Tessa more depth and weight, making her an obvious trope rather than a character that could elicit much more from Courtney.
Image if Courtney’s real guilt is not only that she accidentally killed Tessa but that she also witnesses the unfulfilled promise of her sister’s life. Instead of goofy moments of tired horror movie standards of creepy noises and dark hallways and easy jump scares, Courtney is instead haunted by encounters with her sister who is forgiving but locked in immortal stagnation. Think of little Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) in Interview With The Vampire, a child trapped forever in adolescence, unable to grow to maturity. That was the most tragic part of the film, and could have been here as well. Courtney forced to live with her sister’s eternal childhood could have been a much more emotional twist, one that leads to a similar end but with much more significance.
Jamie’s story is barely worth mentioning, he dealing with guilt for not helping a lover with the child he fathered. But because he feels guilt for it, somehow, that guilt manifests into another demon spirit in the shape of the woman chasing him down, and even causing him physical harm … all dressed up in the same boring horror movie nonsense. Now the thing here is that the woman is not dead. In fact she lives nearby and is raising the child on her own. It is merely the guilt tormenting him. It is solved simply by him going to her, saying sorry and offering to take care of them both (he comes from a family of great wealth, which is itself mighty convenient). How to fix it?
First, don’t make Jamie rich. His entire dilemma is too easy to resolve. It hardly registers as a problem at all. Imagine instead if he had to really face the challenge of raising and caring for a family under much more pressing financial burdens. The whole playboy one-night stand persona is never really addressed as a poor social choice, his guilt not about the way he treats women at all but rather his neglect of one when she needed him most. He solves it with money and a half-believed confession in the end that he’s going to work it out. I couldn’t help but think of Alfie, a movie that got it’s own remake as well, about a man who loves so many women but is condemned to loneliness. That’s where Flatliners should have gone, having Jamie face the women of his past and the trail of destruction he left behind.
An even worse story and one totally missing the point of the character is Sophia’s. What were the filmmakers doing? Her story about bullying is so dismissive and unwarranted, it’s nearly laughable, especially when the real story for her is right under their noses. The bully bit is resolved faster than Jamie’s money solution, with her tracking down the girl she posted images of online and saying she’s sorry. We know nothing about the girl, only that she works at a very nice building and is obviously doing well for herself. With nary two lines of dialogue, she forgives Sophia and disappears from the story. Image if the girl had truly been scarred by the bullying, her life in ruins, and Sophia’s bullying having real consequences, but no, the film is hardly interested in Sophia and gives her thread hardly a notice.
What they should have done is centered her guilt on her relationship to her mother (Wendy Raquel Robinson). The movie goes out of its way to show her mother as an oppressive women with great demands on her daughter, forcing her to become a doctor and to study relentlessly. Imagine if Sophie’s haunting guilt was that she secretly wanted to be a musician or a pilot or an engineer or a whatever but committed herself to being a doctor because she knew of her mother’s failed ambitions. How much more dramatic could that have been where Sophie realizes she is being shaped by her own weaknesses and unconditional love? What a waste.
Lastly is Marlo, who aside from Courtney’s story, gets the most screen time. Of everyone, her guilt is probably the most relevant and certainly something I suspect health care providers stress about. Accidentally diagnosing or administering the wrong medication to a patient has got to be a staggering worry. Any doctors or nurses out there who wish to confirm or deny, feel free in the comments. With Marlo, she’s made a mistake, or at least thinks so, and the death of a patient is tearing her up inside. Admittedly, the movie employs its best visuals in this regard, genuinely giving that stress some weight for Marlo, alluding to the feeling of drowning as representative of the guilt. Of everyone in the film, Marlo is handled the best.
However, the movie again insists on making this a horror movie, jerking on the steering wheel and sending this into the same dark territory of the rest, where the victim in her visions is a demonic figure out to kill her, which again, yes, is metaphorical, but played out with such banality it has no urgency whatsoever. Imagine if she were instead haunted by a man of great compassion who sits in judgement rather than malice. Instead of a gruesome ghostly creature, he challenges her ethical vulnerabilities. In the film, she flatlines again without the help of the others, looking to die so she can get forgiveness, and I’ll again admit that this is a smart move, but as the film is so scared to truly challenge its audience and make a statement, it wastes this moment as well. If there was to be any character who should have died in this story, it should have been Marlo. Her death at the end would have been far more impactful than Courtney’s at the halfway point.
Okay, moving on and to a few final thoughts. Kiefer Sutherland appears in this movie, having been a lead in the original, yet he is not the same character. In the first, he is a med student named Nelson Wright. Here, he is Dr. Barry Wolfson, a walk-on cameo of sorts who is given nothing to do. Why? While this trend is not new and almost always fails (the recent Ghostbusters is a good example of this), having stars return to remakes in short bits is a mistake if all they do is show up with no reason for being there. How much better would this have been if he had come back as Nelson and worked at the hospital and discovered others doing what he pioneered years earlier, he still obsessed by his experience? I get it’s a reboot but what a waste of potential.
And finally, the big question and the reason the film truly fails. Why do these students need to flatline at all? The film uses guilt as a catalyst to manifest monsters of sorts to torment these characters but shouldn’t they already be tormented by them? Why does a near-death experience trigger these visions? The fact is, Courtney is already shown to be overrun by her guilt and asking others about dying and reviving before she does it. Marlo is troubled by her actions and Sophia is suppressing her own dark thoughts about what she did in high school. The reason to flatline never makes sense, nor does the repercussions of doing it. Only Courtney’s and Marlo’s stories at least feel tangentiality connected to the afterlife with both their actions based on guilt for the death of others, and yet, why does it take flatlining to really make them better consider it?
What’s even more frustrating is how the film actually hints at a better story before wholly abandoning it, that of superior mental acuity as evidenced by Courtney’s remarkable accomplishments following her post flatline experience. She is suddenly extremely well-versed and has almost total recall of anything she’s read or experienced in her life. Now that’s much more interesting than a cheap ghost. What if each character developed something different with their time on the other side and had to face all new challenges in the light of these advancements? However, it’s glossed over after a minor moment and never fleshed out. That would have been a better film.
What do you think? Are you a fan of Flatliners? What would you have liked to have seen done differently?