Archive Photos/Moviepix/Getty ImagesToday, when we talk about the genre work of the late Joel Schumacher, most tend to think about his infamous Batman films, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin. And while those movies are, for better or worse, the legacy of this director, his most underrated masterpiece is the 1990 fantastical thriller, Flatliners. With a style bordering on bombastic, this film, released on August 10, 1990, is like nothing in Schumacher’s oeuvre, and remains, 35 years later, an arresting and eerie cinematic experience to rival the likes of David Cronenberg.In an attempt to figure out the line between being alive and not being alive, five medical students named Nelson (Kiefer Sutherland), Joe (William Baldwin), David (Kevin Bacon), Rachel (Julia Roberts), and Randy (Oliver Platt), enter into a series of experiments in which they intentionally “flatline,” in order to truly experience what its like to nearly pass away. As Nelson, Sutherland begins the movie by declaring, “It’s a good day to die.”But the thing about Flatliners is that it turns out, for these characters, it’s never a good day to almost die, because the thing about the almost-afterlife in this movie is that the people you bullied or screwed over in your past will literally haunt you to the point of driving you clinically insane. While flatlining, two of the characters, Nelson and David, have encounters with people they bullied when they were younger, while Joe is wracked with guilt about his creepy habit to film his sexual partners without their knowledge. In short, there are no mysteries of the afterlife unlocked by the titular flatliners; instead, they discover that the one thing waiting for them in death is their own subconscious attacking them.While the premise has a supernatural feeling to it, close to something out of a Stephen King novel, ultimately, Flatliners feels closer to science fiction than outright horror or fantasy. The actual afterlife doesn’t really seem to exist in this movie, and instead, the worst possible thing that can happen to these people is locked within their own minds.In a twisted way, this makes Flatliners a life-affirming movie about people trying to almost-kill themselves. If there is a message from screenwriter Peter Filardi, it seems that it’s not that God or some other force will judge us in the end, but rather, our own memories, guilt, and anxieties will do that for us. The film stops short of a full-on Philip K. Dick twist or anything like that, but it does seem to suggest that the concept of ghosts and a life after death do exist, but only in our minds. And, in this way, Flatliners asserts that some hallucinations aren’t unreal per se, but rather, just parts of a wider range of sensory experiences we can’t access all the time.That said, as unnerving as the film is, there’s something stylish and beautiful about the way Schumacher crafts everything. It’s not quite on the level of David Lynch, but it’s certainly closer to being a piece of art than, say, the 1992 thriller The Lawnmower Man. Schumacher wants the movie to be scary, but he’s not making a scary movie. Kevin Bacon and Julia Roberts in Flatliners. | Mike Weinstein/Columbia/Kobal/ShutterstockThe strange premise, which at times feels like a very macabre after-school special, is ultimately buoyed by the cast. The fact that this many stars are in the same movie makes it like The Breakfast Club of early ‘90s horror movies. Bacon is nervy and jumpy as David, while Sutherland is convincingly unhinged as Nelson. Meanwhile, Julia Roberts' performance here is a reminder that she was always a solid and convincing actor, capable of nearly any role, and that her greatest hits shouldn’t just be limited to Erin Brockovich or Pretty Woman. In some ways, Flatliners feels like the beginning of an alternate dimension in which Roberts took on more movies like Conspiracy Theory and fewer romantic comedies. Overall, the triumph of Flatliners today is that it doesn’t really feel like it fits neatly into any one genre. It’s not quite a horror movie, the ghosts aren’t quite real enough for it to be considered fantasy, and the science fiction elements are slight. Instead, the movie manages to be all of those things, and perhaps something else, too. It’s a weird, sometimes overlooked movie that is better than it seems at first glance. It may be a movie about near-death, but ultimately, the movie pulls back the curtain on a part of life we can’t really imagine.Flatliners streams on Pluto TV.