Remember Flatliners, Joel Schumacher’s 1990 sci-fi/thriller about a group of medical students trying to cross over into the afterlife? They stop one another’s hearts just long enough to enter the great beyond, and then jolt them back into the land of the living before too long. Perhaps you noticed a fleeting reference to the film in last summer’s Popstar, wherein Bill Hader is relieved to learn that he has not pooped himself after a soft-goth Joanna Newsom artificially halts his heartbeat in a hobby he refers to as ‘flatlining.’ Ready or not, here comes a remake!

In a thematically appropriate executive franchising decision, Sony will unnaturally revive this film on September 29 with a new take on the material. For the cadre of reckless medical experimenters, they’ve corralled a solid stable of hot young talents including Rogue One alum Diego LunaNeighbors 2 sorority sister Kiersey Clemons, erstwhile Juno Ellen PagexXx: Return of Xander Cage star Nina Dobrev, and British TV staple James Norton. Though the personnel may be new (not to mention director Niels Arden Oplev, the Dane responsible for helming the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, along with some work for Mr. Robot), the material has remained pretty much the same. The students render the barrier between our world and the next permeable, but that allows dark forces to enter our living plane, too.

As is the case with all stories about overly curious scientists, their hubris is their undoing. But what horrors lurk beyond the veil of life? And is the movie, as Kiefer Sutherland claimed last summer, a secret sequel to the original movie? (Sutherland is supposedly in the cast, but there’s no sign of him in the trailer.) We’ll have to wait until September to find out. Until then, amuse yourself with the stylish, simple poster for the film:

Sony
Sony
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