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The flatliners want to know if near-death tales of bright lights and out-of-body experiences are true. But what they find appears to be hell, i.e., a place where they pay for their sins. Resuscitation breaks them out of the bad place – but they can’t shrug off their punishment so easily. Their sins follow them into reality, where the consequences p...

David breaks free of karma first. Note, though, that he doesn’t engineer this in any particular way. As an adult, he simply acknowledges the way he behaved was harmful, and makes amends. Saying sorry to Winnie Hicks ends his suffering. Whether it makes any real difference to the girl he terrorised is a more complex question. Either way, the film’s ...

Traditional models of the underworld are reassuringly communal places, aren’t they? That is, medieval illustrations of hell may be frightening, but at least they’re crowded. When Dante describes hell in The Divine Comedy, there are so many souls down there it’s like a house party. The damned, we’ve long held, suffer together. We still cling to this...

Flatliners shows us four people whose near-death experiences make them re-evaluate their world view. But another way of inspecting the film is as Nelson’s death dreamfrom start to finish. It begins with Nelson going under and ends when he wakes up. In between, he inhabits a curiously empty world. He lives in a city devoid of bustling side walks, an...

Like the deluded lovers in Alfred Hitchocks’ Rope, Nelson thinks he’s special. Intellect and daring make him an übermensch – a ‘super man’, or superior being. Also like Hitchcocks’ killers, he believes that gives him the right to murder. After his first near-death experience, Nelson feels even more god-like. “Can you hear the traffic on the lake sh...