White Noise - Schreie aus dem Jenseits

Successful architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) is overjoyed when his wife Anna (Chandra West) reveals her pregnancy. Then she disappears. Jonathan confronts Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) who's been following him. Raymond who lost his son tells him about Electronic Voice Phenomenon and that he has received messages from Anna. Her body is found having drowned. Six months later, Jonathan moves into an apartment and strange electronic things continue. He becomes convinced about EVP. He goes to Raymond who is now helping Sarah Tate (Deborah Kara Unger) with her lost fiancé. As he obsessively decipher the electronic signals, he encounters menacing spirits and even those who are not dead quite yet.

Michael Keaton is past his early successes and is yet to gain his resurgent accolades. It's a time period when he was a has-been doing limited work. If nothing else, this movie's success shows that he can still be the lead. I really like the cold static moody atmosphere. I don't think the son is necessary but it's where the story goes that leaves me a bit cold. The spirits are a disappointment. The near-death messages idea is where the movie goes down the wrong path. The moody ghost story turns into a muddled thriller. The spirits' climatic battle is a mess. This movie starts good but ends poorly.

I first heard about White Noise when I saw the TV advert. Before then I didn't even know it existed. I watched the trailer online and decided that I would go and see it. Now being a fan of films like The Sixth Sense, I thought that this film would give me everything I wanted. It has Michael Keaton in it, and he rocks. Unfortunately the film did not deliver. It tried to be another Sixth Sense or Stir of Echoes, and failed miserably. It has a very promising start, but the middle just drags on repeating itself, and ends with a completely poor twist which any monkey could have figured out. Unfortunately like most "Scary" films nowadays it relies on loud noises and bangs to make the audience jump. This film could have been so much more. It's a shame because it was a good idea.

Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) is a successful architect. His wife, Anna (Chandra West) is an even more successful novelist. When Anna goes missing one night, they fear she is dead. Suddenly, an odd man named Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) shows up and tells Jonathan that his wife has been trying to contact him from "the other side", via Electronic Voice Phenomena (EVPs). Rivers also gradually gets wrapped up in EVPs, which lead him to some unusual situations and the heart of a mystery.

I had a very divided reaction to White Noise. Some aspects were excellent, but in many ways, the film had potential that was never actualized. There are also some flaws that kept drawing me out of the film's universe. Overall I felt the film worked, but probably not as writer Niall Johnson and director Geoffrey Sax intended.

Let's talk about what the film did right first. The major assets, as mentioned in the title of my review, were the production/set design, cinematography and overall atmosphere. The latter largely hinges on the first two. The production/set design and cinematography were nearly perfect. Everything was focused on the idea of white noise, especially the most well known visual depiction of white noise--television "static" or "snow". The credits introduced a motif of jarring intrusions of white noise, which occasionally recurred throughout the film (although perhaps not enough). There were clever instantiations of a visual "white noise" theme in the sets, such as the outside waterfall on the lower level of Jonathan's apartment building, and the wall of glass blocks inside his apartment. The color scheme was white, silver and blue, washed out so that the film had an almost black and white feel. There were also more abstract references to white noise, such as the running water motif (water dynamics are mathematically chaotic, as is white noise, which is also thought of as being literally random), and the arcing electricity. All of this combined to provide a wonderful, gloomy atmosphere, and in another film, would easily compensate for any minor flaws to bring the film up to a 10.

However, there are a number of problems with White Noise. Keaton's performance was the major sticking point for me. He seems aloof and brooding throughout the entire film. While that may have been perfect for Batman, it doesn't work for me here. Both McNeice and Deborah Kara Unger (as Sarah Tate) were fine, but their roles were minor enough to not be able to carry the film. I usually like Keaton a lot, and I can't say that I dislike him here, but his performance is very odd and off-putting.

Another problem was the pacing. For a long time, White Noise may as well have been a realist drama. While that's fine for other films, it also doesn't tend to work in a horror/thriller. The only directors I've seen really able to pull that combination off effectively are Alfred Hitchcock and M. Night Shyamalan. It takes so long to get to the horror/thriller part of the story that many people likely either lose interest by that point, or they're interested because they'd rather see a realist drama, and the more supernatural ending will be unsatisfying for them. The pacing also doesn't fit with the white noise/chaos motif. This is a film that should have been edited like a Michael Bay vehicle.

Finally, I had a number of problems with the story. One, there are quite a few superfluous elements (such as Jonathan's son). Two, although I'm not someone who usually complains about genre combinations, there was an attempt to make White Noise both a "benevolent spirit" story, ala Ghost (1990) and a Ring (2002)-like otherworldly threat. The two just didn't meld. Three, the thriller aspect, which enters primarily at the climax of the film, seems too tacked on to engender an appropriate emotional reaction from the audience. And four, the supernatural aspects and especially the "twist revelation" of the ending are very rushed and unpleasantly ambiguous, possibly in an attempt to hide the fact that the plot in these respects wasn't very well thought out. There is a tremendous amount of potential in the script, and it is entertaining enough to marginally recommend, but this seems more like an early draft that was rushed to completion, or possibly a film that suffered a lot of studio meddling.

The bottom line is that while there are enough positive elements to make White Noise worth a watch to serious genre fans and students of film-making, do not expect the story to grab you by the short and curlies, and do not expect much of a resolution. Enjoy the film primarily for its visuals. I'm generously rating the film a 7 out of 10.

White Noise comes across as a horror movie that tries to do something original before they are forced into doing a remake of an Asian film. It will still draw comparison with Hideo Nakata's Ring trilogy because of the static TV's but that is unfair due to the subject. The subject being Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), which is a paranormal occurrence where the dead contact the living through static, recorded on the TV or a sound recording device. Original enough to make a movie about plus scary things jumping out of a static TV is relevant to the subject. Yay Hollywood. The apparent decent plot and the not-too-shabby cast headed by Michael Keaton actually had me very eager to see this, such a shame then that the movie actually doesn't do what it says on the tin.

The first half of the movie is a decent drama about the loss of a mans wife and his obsession with contacting her from beyond the grave whilst his work and the relationship with his son suffers. The second half however seems to just draw from the basic scary movie template and disappointingly swerves away from the dead contacting the living and into Keaton running around like a psychic detective in a race against time trying to save people from dark forces.

The movie opens in generic perfect home situation. Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers the successful architect who is married to his wife Anna the successful author, even his sons mother (the divorcée) has a good relationship with Mr. & Mrs. Rivers. Apart from the radio skipping to static a few times (an unused plot device?) things seem pretty rosy. Until "I love you" gets mouthed from the wife leaving the driveway taking the kid to school. Automatic dead meat. When will they learn? The police assume she slipped from the motorway, bashed her head on a rock then got taken away by the tide but Jonathan doesn't accept her death and doesn't give up hope. However, on his first day back from work since his wife went missing he is followed by a stranger whom he confronts. The stranger turns out to be some sort of expert in a phenomenon known as EVP and he says not only is Anna dead but she has been contacting him from the other side. Jonathan dismisses it until she leaves a message on his answering machine. Yeah, it is that simple. Cue Jonathan getting obsessed about finding out what her message is, mishaps happening and Jonathan getting even more obsessed over something completely different. Drawing in another believer in EVP they investigate into messages the recording equipment seems to be getting from the future.

The ending leaves the movie ridden with plot holes, which has frankly become expected of movies like this from the past few years. It could have been so much more. Perhaps the director was wary of making this film 'The Sixth Sense from the other point of view' but then again the CGI scary ghosts wouldn't work in a more subtle setting like that. The plot turns into some non-sensical slush whilst the score let's the film down. The acting wasn't the strongest either but if you want to be scared every 20 minutes by the volume being cheaply cranked up and CGI ghouls flying out of static then go spend your hard earned cash on this.

6/10 Robb Idle

What a shame it is when a potentially captivating and refreshingly low-key story manages to latch onto your interest at the start and then gradually lets you down further and further until you're left scratching your mystified head by the time it reaches its overdone conclusion. Unfortunately, this is what happened to me by the end of WHITE NOISE.

It wasn't Michael Keaton's fault; it was a pleasure to see him return as the star of a brand new movie once again, looking a bit wrinkled perhaps, but still managing to give a strong and sincere performance. As a man whose wife has recently died, he becomes obsessed with her wandering spirit in the afterlife (not a new idea), apparently getting contacted by her through that funky electrical fuzz business you see on your television screen when there's nothing being broadcast.

The idea of spirits communicating via the airwaves is called EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomena) and there are a lot of people who actually believe in it for real, so I'm not going to make any comments about what I think of that, or them. Let me just say that I'm all for suspension of disbelief when it comes to buying into fantastic films like this, but what I can't tolerate is not understanding what the hell was supposed to be taking place, which is about where I was left stranded when the credits finally began to roll. Much static indeed.

There are occasionally movies like this that have me completely baffled, but if a film fails to make itself clear for me, I tend to consider that to be the fault of the filmmaker, not my own (unless I watched it while I was too tired to focus or something). Well, for WHITE NOISE I was wide awake, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed -- so guess who's to blame?