The images of Corin Nemec’s soul not very well optically inserted as it travels through a glowing tunnel and only seen on a video monitor (with the same piece of film being used several times over) is a considerably underwhelming depiction of such a grandiose idea as travel into the afterlife. The ideas unfortunately fall flat through, for once, not being given the spectacular Hollywood razzle-dazzle treatment. Equally good are many of the incidental – if not entirely well integrated – ideas packed around the edges of the story – the eerie scenes where Donald Sutherland taps computer commands telling the guard dog and Niki what to do, or the scene where Corin Nemec and Hayley Reynolds share a consensual dream under hypnosis. The idea of a scientific quest to tap psychic energy and to scientifically examine the afterlife using somebody whose spirit has been held back from departing has a grand scope to it, even if the film’s idea feels more like a combination of Flatliners (1990) and the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Facts in the Case of M. Based on a short story that was published in 1966 by Daphne du Maurier, the author best known for Rebecca (1938), The Breakthrough/The Lifeforce Experiment is that rarity among science-fiction films – a film that fails through having good ideas.
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