White Noise

Give up the ghost: Cliché-ridden White Noise sends an interesting premise to the grave

By Anthony Del Valle

There are at least two universal truths in mediocre Hollywood film dramas: If a main character coughs, even once, you can be sure he will soon get sick and die. And if a film begins with a star whose character spends a lot of time hugging or saying "I love you" to an adored one, the object of the adoration will within minutes be brutally killed. White Noise follows the latter scenario, and the lack of confidence the film immediately inspires proves totally warranted.

The plot sounds promising, not only as a horror film but as an entertaining treatise on the process of moving on. Architect John Rivers (Michael Keaton) is enjoying his idyllic life with his ultra-hot young wife Anna (Chandra West)--which brings us to a third cinematic truth: Characters played by middle-aged male stars are always married to hot young babes. But we'll let that pass. Anna is off on a business trip, and at 2:30 a.m. John's kitchen clock suddenly stops and a radio switches on magically, through which a female voice, embedded in static, starts calling out John's name. Of course, it turns out that 2:30 a.m. is when Anna was the victim of a fatal accident. It's not long before a mysterious stranger named Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) tells John he's an expert in "electronic voice phenomenon," and he knows Anna is trying to contact her husband from beyond the grave.

Shortly after John and Raymond start working together, the EVP expert is killed--apparently by spirits who are angry that he's meddling with their world. When John takes over Raymond's work, the spirits, naturally, get pissed at him. Worse. The images that John starts to record are not just of the dead trying to contact him, but of the living who are apparently moments away from death and need rescuing.

This could be good stuff. But screenwriter Niall Johnson fails to flesh out his story with the kinds of complications and plot reversals that are the bloodline for horror flicks. The tale grows more preposterous as the film drags on, and it's likely a bad idea to try to figure out the logic of various plot points.

Director Geoffrey Sax is content to rely on stock tricks--momentary glimpses of what may be ghosts accompanied by a blast of music, a shot of a beautiful female spirit recorded on a VCR suddenly upstaged by an old hag. The overall emotional tone is surprisingly somber, considering that the movie's only purpose is (apparently) nonsensical entertainment. There's not an intentional laugh in the whole film. The ending--in which a detective who has had a single conversation with John winds up solving a major mystery with astounding simplicity--is so disjointed because of Nick Arthurs' artsy-fartsy ragged editing that it's difficult to even see what's going on. (You might want to check out Nicolas Roeg's somewhat similar 1974 film Don't Look Now to get a feel for what a gifted director can do with this kind of material.)

Keaton has demonstrated elsewhere remarkable gifts at playing both comedy and drama, and here he manages a pleasant demeanor. But his performance is limp. We get no sense that John is a man in mourning or that he experiences any desperate euphoria when he finally makes contact with his wife. Keaton's walk-through work robs the film of its emotional engine.

The technical work is first-rate, although Chris Seager's cinematography is steeped in such heavy dark-blue hues that you come away feeling as if you've just spent a day at a funeral. No doubt that's exactly what the director wanted. Why, however, is another matter.