The problem with Joel Schumacher is that he is a competent MTV director – where he has often worked with groups like INXS – who has exceeded his level of competence by trying to tackle plot and drama. Schumacher’s entire effect comes in the look of a film, the lighting and set design, yet he has absolutely no concept of dramatic sincerity. Even when Schumacher tries to make a stripped-back, handheld camera film like Tigerland (2001), all he produces is a handful of Vietnam War/bootcamp cliches.

You cannot deny that Schumacher and photographer Jan de Bont [who also turned out to be a director as bad as Schumacher – see The Haunting (1999)] don’t make an exquisitely lovely film out of Flatliners. They invest it with a dark Mediaeval atmosphere, all cavernous Gothic hospitals and beautifully lit cathedralar architecture – this is a hospital where giant classical statues just lie about in basements. The soft and evocative, almost candle-lit photography is exceptional, and the classical score excellent. When it comes to the horror scenes, Schumacher pumps up a dynamic medley of flashing light and steam effects a la the Scott Brothers, Ridley and Tony. Schumacher is even capable of producing some eerie images when he wants to – the way a set of blinking construction lights can take on sinister overtones, or how a school of passing night cyclists momentary seem like phantoms. However, you are never more than aware that Schumacher has designed the entire film for effect rather than rationale – like when we get to Kiefer Sutherland’s apartment, which is decorated in ankle-height neon strips for no reason other than the lighting effect it provides. It is exactly the result you might get when you allow a window dresser to direct a horror film.

While Flatliners is worth watching for the atmosphere that Joel Schumacher and Jan de Bont evoke alone, it seems ultimately irrelevant. The film has a premise that has immensely exciting promise to it. Up until the story gets back from the beyond and turns into horror psycho-drama – about a third of the way in – it continues to convey promise. However, all of it – the scientific quest into the afterlife, even the spooky horror elements – eventually transpire as being no more than a twentysomething sensitivity and angst film. It is as though Joel Schumacher has crossbred St Elmo’s Fire with Altered States (1980) or the climactic afterlife trip from Brainstorm (1983). The sum profundity of tackling such an epic issue as life after death is for William Baldwin to say sorry for secretly making videotapes of the women he beds, for Kevin Bacon to apologize to a girl he was mean to growing up, and for Julia Roberts to come to terms with her father who committed suicide. Flatliners operates on the infuriatingly banal presentiment that all the problems of the past can be solved by warm fuzzy feelgood cliches. It is sad to think that when it comes to taking on the great challenge of asking what lies after death all that Flatliners can end up doing is to resolve everything on a figurative group hug.