PLOT SUMMARY: Five medical students, eager to experience the afterlife, take part in a risky experiment with dangerous side effects.
Having never watched the original, I was a little excited to watch this remake simply for the concept that sounded intriguing.
Five medical students attempt a dangerous experiment in which they stop their hearts for a couple of minutes to experience the afterlife.
FLATLINERS Movie Plot
The movie at first centres around Courtney and a tragic past where her texting and driving causes her to hit a truck and fall into a lake. She survives, her younger sister doesn't. Cut to a few years later and she's a medical student obsessed with what happens when people die.
She devises this risky experiment and in a way forces two of her friends to join in.
Without giving them a proper chance to consider whether or not they want in, Courtney injects herself and puts herself out.
Her experience when she's dead is all about floating and seeing white blobs of gas floating around. When she awakens with the help of a third friend, she explains the experience as feeling untethered.
And honestly, that is exactly how I felt when I watched this- untethered and uninterested.
The cast was good, the story was interesting but the way it was executed was really bland. The horror elements were thrown in and toward the end, when everything is explained, all of it seemed unnecessary.
There was no bringing back demons from the experiment. Rather, it was bringing back metaphorical demons.
All of the students were burdened with guilt.
They had all made mistakes and hadn't dealt with it or made amends.
Their brains were simply enhancing the guilt part and making them hallucinate their sins.
The only way out was to accept and apologize.
FLATLINERS Ending Explained with spoilers!
For Courtney, the guilt is too much and she is consumed by it completely when she hallucinates her sister in her apartment. She falls down to her death and this makes the other four realize what they had to do before they too succumb to their guilty consciences.
One by one they all do so and it takes a while for Marlo to accept her guilt because doing so would mean putting her career on the line.
Her one mistake of not reading a chart causes a patient to die. Instead of admitting to it, she changes the autopsy report as well. Her guilt enhances after the experiment and she confesses to Ray who bluntly tells her that she would have to accept her mistake or maybe she wasn't meant to be a doctor.
Marlo's solution is to put herself under again and apologize to the patient that she sees in her dreams. Except nothing goes as planned. She almost dies and is brought back by Ray but before that, Courtney comes to her and asks her to forgive herself. Marlo learns to forgive herself for her mistake and is pulled out.
She confesses to what she had done and is put on probation. In the end, she tosses Courtney's laptop into the river and the friends meet together to toast their deceased friend.
Now only Courtney knows, they say. Only she knows what the afterlife is really like.
The movie could have been a real thrill ride. The horror scenes are even more intense. However, the story unravels when it is revealed that it is their guilt that is enhanced and haunts them. Plus, everyone seems to want to indulge in carnal pleasures once they are awakened.
Perhaps it is this superficiality or the unlikeable characters or the fact that it is wrongly characterized as a horror, that makes this movie-watching experience a complete disappointment.
My mind wandered several times through it and I had to remind myself to pay attention.
Something was amiss in this movie. It falls flat.
Maybe the movie would have worked better if it was tightened and the runtime was shorter. The actors were impressive but the characters lacked a certain something. Perhaps they weren't explored properly or their drama was unnecessarily inserted in to show depth. In any way, I couldn't bring myself to connect with them.
Without this factor, without making us care about the characters, the story too doesn't appeal.
Not something I would watch again.
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