Flatliners

About Flatliners (1990)

Joel Schumacher’s Flatliners (1990) assembled one of the most impressive young casts of the era—Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts, Kevin Bacon, William Baldwin, and Oliver Platt—as medical students who deliberately stop their hearts to experience death before being resuscitated, only to find that something follows them back. The film’s striking visual design used dramatic lighting, Gothic architecture, and billowing curtains to create an otherworldly atmosphere in what should have been mundane hospital settings. Roberts filmed the movie between Pretty Woman and Sleeping with the Enemy at the peak of her sudden stardom, while Sutherland’s intense commitment to his role helped ground the film’s supernatural elements in believable dread. The concept proved so compelling that it was remade in 2017, though the original remains the definitive version for its ambitious visual style and genuine sense of existential terror.