Alternate Title: I Know What You Did in the Abandoned Medical Wing

Hollywood loves nothing more than a remake.
In 2017, audiences were subjected to the remake of the 1990 film starring Kiefer Sutherland, Julia Roberts and Kevin Bacon.
Medical students use themselves as guinea pigs in a bold experiment to see what lies beyond death.
By stopping their hearts for a “safe” amount of time to avoid brain damage, they trigger a near-death experience and are then revived to report back about the afterlife. Simples. What could go wrong?

Ellen Page plays a gifted young medical student who is obsessed with finding out what happens after death. (It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see why – she is shown in the beginning of the film in a terrible car accident with her sister who does not survive.)
She ropes in four of her fellow students to participate in the experiment – the playboy (James Norton), the beauty queen (Nina Dobrev), the one under her mother’s thumb (Kiersey Clemons) and, clearly playing well outside of his comfort zone, Diego Luna plays the handsome Spaniard who keeps warning them in his charming accent that what they’re doing is a bad idea.

Four of the students flatline and each comes out with apparently more intellectual gifts than they had before such as the ability to recall obscure medical case histories and how to play the piano.
After they have a drunken snowball fight in the street after a near-miss flatline – ain’t it grand to be young and alive again? – they each start to realise that something has followed them back to the land of the living.

Diagnosis:

This film was brought back to life but clearly flatlined for too long. It is a shell of its former self with none of what made the original so enduringly good.
There were a couple of scares but at its heart, this is really just an expensively produced teen drama with a trailer and poster art that is scarier than any moment in the actual film.

Having mentally flatlined watching the full hour and 49 minutes of this film, I can only report that I saw some terrible, terrible things. Cheesy dialogue.
Terrible acting. A totally gratuitous sex scene. And no, I can’t remember how to play the piano.

• Vanessa Cervantes