White Noise
A Review by Tyler Foster
The deep bass voice of the movie's trailer intones that "the subject of some movies is so disturbing, that those who experience them will never be the same again." And White Noise's premise is indeed pretty creepy: Look into E.V.P. for real and it’s easy to end up losing a lot of sleep. Unfortunately, White Noise fails to make good on any of the built-in potential, delivering a gratingly familiar collection of jolt tactics and one or two real scares buried in an overly slow runtime and capped with one of the worst endings in recent memory. Staring into the static of this film is not going to get anyone anywhere.
Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, an architect whose wife, writer Anna Rivers (Chandra West), goes missing and is eventually found dead. But Jonathan receives a visit from a mysterious man named Raymond Price (Ian McNiece), who claims he is able to not only contact the dead, but has received messages from Jonathan's wife. But there is, of course, more to the mystery (jeez, what would the movie be without it?), and with the help of fellow E.V.P.-listener Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), Jonathan takes a headfirst dive into the paranormal.
Such blind-diving leads White Noise into a cut-rate, unoriginal and cliché mystery-thriller plotline that feels less like a thread moving through the film than an abnormal growth suffocating the ideas surrounding E.V.P. It would be easy to say that a documentary made on the same subject could have been a lot better, but White Noise even falls far below most of its average supernatural thriller counterparts. It's the fact that E.V.P. is real that makes the concept scary, but the movie's presentation is so hokey and ridiculous, it sucks the validity right out of the film. To put it simply, say, Van Helsing was far more realistic -- and scary -- than this.*
The performances from range from average to just dead on arrival, with Keaton being pretty much blank-faced and dull aside from a few moments of emotion he stumbles through awkwardly. Chandra West isn't on-screen long enough to be memorable, and Ian McNiece gets the unsavory job of intoning eerily and lurking about. It's nice to see Deborah Kara Unger again (The Game was a long time ago), but her character here has so little to it that Unger has nothing to build off of. The rest of the cast fades ably into the background, despite obviously layered roles I spied in the credits, like "Minister," "Work Man," and "Presence #1."
And then there's the finale. It's hard to fully describe how awful the ending to White Noise really is, except that it’s been thoroughly botched on multiple levels. Bad writing converges with cornball direction, along with a dollop of confusion to make sure everything sticks together, kind of like a spitball aimed at the audience. Geoffrey Sax's helming skills aren't exactly shining by the final act, but during the last 12 minutes his interest apparently hit rock bottom. The twists White Noise unveils are like seeing a failed magic trick repeated in desperation – confusing, disappointing, and sad. A better conclusion might have just barely gained the flick weaker guilty pleasure status, but unfortunately, it's the worst part of the film.
White Noise is not just a waste of time and money, but of a great idea. Not only does the premise fail as a standard supernatural thriller, but the effort could have been better spent on a non-fiction film about the same subject without ruining one of the few ideas Hollywood hadn't yet thought of. The science of E.V.P.s is fascinating to say the least, and it's a huge disappointment that all these people have invested in such a subpar production. As the last bits of potential drain away in the last reel of White Noise, what remains is a mess of dispirited static, leaving just the dull echo of dead air.
Grade: D
Starring Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Chandra West, Sarah Strange, and Ian McNiece
Written by Niall Johnson | Directed by Geoffrey Sax
Universal Pictures (2005) | 101 Minutes
Rated PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and language
*Yes, I understand that Van Helsing wasn't scary. That was the joke.
Note: I implore you! Find out good stuff about real E.V.P. at www.aaevp.com.