The «Flatliners» had better stay in their graves

Cinema Wednesdays - Hélène Lavoyer

«It's a beautiful day to die.»

At the instigation of medical student Courtney (Ellen Paige), four of her colleagues join her in a strange experiment: they induce cardiac arrest on their own, leaving the heart stopped for a few minutes... before the others take it upon themselves to bring the one who has let go back to life.

After the experiment, Courtney, Jamie (James Norton), Marlo (Nina Dobrev), and Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) will find their intellectual abilities altered—each in a different way. Only Ray—played by Diego Luna—remains wary and refrains from playing with death. Is he right to be cautious? Perhaps, because frightening and supernatural events will gradually creep into his friends’ lives, leading to tragedy…

The new version of the film Flatliners - The forbidden experiment is a failure on a number of levels. First of all, and this is one of the major errors of the distribution, the feature film is forbidden to children under sixteen and appears under the category horror. Certainly, the soundtrack leads to apprehension and sometimes even anxiety. Nevertheless, not an ounce of imagination, novelty or unexpectedness manages to inhabit the one hundred and ten minutes spent in the cinema. Fans of horror films will undoubtedly find themselves disappointed.

With the exception of Ellen Paige's name, there's little to criticize in the acting. The scare scenes were executed with great professionalism, and those representing the festive side of each of the characters, rather natural.

One regret remains, however: the lack of originality in their characters. The gang is made up of commonplace characters for the cinema: a handsome «kid» and his female version, two «trophy girls» and a fathead. It's also clear from the aborted dialogue and scenes that the casting directors were looking less for quality of interpretation than for quality of reproduction.

In the multitude of themes tackled - such as the supernatural, science, grief, acceptance, youth and self-transcendence - the characters lose their depth, so much so that they evolve within heterogeneous and poorly connected frameworks.

Hollywood waited twenty-seven years before releasing a copy of Flatliners appeared in 1990. Did the studios hope that the passage of time would mask their lack of imagination? Is there a message behind this disorganized «patchwork»? In any case, we’ll stick with the first version, which is more interesting from both a technical and interpretive standpoint.

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Photo credit: © Pop Inquierer