Flatlines comes from the late director Joel Schumacher, with an excellent cast of Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin and Oliver Platt.
Flatliners follows five medical students Nelson Wright (Sutherland), Rachel Mannus (Roberts), David Labraccio (Bacon), Joe Hurley (Baldwin) and Randy Steckle (Platt) that look to conduct an experiment, which will see them look to kill themselves and be bought back from the dead, to see if there is anything in the afterlife.
Once the first member of the team Nelson returns, he starts experiencing visions from his time in the afterlife, before letting other members of the team go under, each one experiences a different nightmare from their past, one they will need to face head on to overcome, giving them the answers they were looking for in the impossible question, is there any afterlife.
Flatliners brings us an interesting concept that shows how everyone could have a different vision of death, which will see them needing to face the sins of their lives. It gives us an incite into how people will react to something they knew was wrong, that haunts them in their mind, but after getting close to death it comes into their everyday lives. We do keep everything in and around the scientific ideas behind the experiment, without needing to get flashy behind what happens, along with making this happen in an abandoned church, used to symbolising how the resurrection in the bible happened.
With the exceptional cast, we are left to see five of the best young actors of their generation shine, before going onto even bigger careers, each one is perfectly cast, with Sutherland as the one who wants to push things to the limits, Roberts showing the career driven doctor, Bacon showing us the one that will do the right thing, even if it is the wrong time, Baldwin being the sleezy womanizer and Platt being the one that doesn’t want to risk anything.
Rating 5/5
