Flatliners (1990) is an odd and, ultimately, ineffectual morality tale. Five medical students in New York City, having a fascination with after-death experiences, begin taking turns at dying and being brought back to life.
This doesn’t go well.
Wright finds himself in a sordid incident in which a boy, hiding in the branches of a tree, is stoned by other boys, falls out, and badly injures a dog – and himself. Pulled back from the beyond, Wright begins to be assaulted by parties unknown, and feels deeply troubled.
Hurley, who is engaged to be married, finds himself in a nightmare sequence in which the women he’s slept with, and videotaped while doing so, keep throwing his pickup lines in his face. Shortly after returning from the beyond, his fiancee becomes ex-, when she discovers his collection of tapes.
Labraccio returns to a past in which he may have participated in the humiliation of a young black girl. This leads him to track her down and apologize.
Manus relives the loss of her father to suicide, which she obscurely believes she triggered by intruding on him when he was about to take some illegal drugs. Pulled back, she now keeps seeing her father in shadows. A second flatline experience results in his explanation that his PTSD was the trigger, not herself.
The fifth, Steckle, refrains from flatlining. He says he doesn’t want to be chased by his childhood babysitter, waving a sandwich at him.
The theme is, mostly, be good or you’ll hate your afterlife. Given the dearth of evidence for an afterlife, though, the story lacks any staying power, which is to say that having a discussion of the lessons of the movie is far-fetched. A modern morality tale is a logical sequence of steps, “If you do that then this will happen to you!” But in the afterlife? While the religious zealot may decry this assertion, no one really knows if there is an afterlife – much less what occurs there.
Sure, acting in an honest, respectful manner is a good thing – but this story, at least of the three men, does nothing to honestly affirm that theme.
And Manus’ lesson, whatever it may be, is a discordant note in the chorus. She did nothing wrong, but she imagines she did, whether consciously or unconsciously. If you consider Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, or extended novel if you prefer (and not the Peter Jackson movies, and I’ll thank you not to remind me of them when it comes to fidelity and understanding), every major character is confronted with the question of temptation; their immediate and long-term fates are an exploration of how reactions to temptation ultimately conclude.
Not so here. This discordance lessens the impact of an already dubious premise.
It’s too bad. The film is a professional production otherwise, enjoyable – but ultimately a puff piece working off a dubious premise.
