Geoffry Sax’s Horror Film ‘White Noise’ Can’t Create a Clear Picture

Geoffry Sax’s White Noise is about, among other things, watching static. Not just any static, but static through which dead people chatter at living people. To enlist your interest in this enterprise, White Noise gives you a central character who wants to watch this static very much.

That would be John Rivers (Michael Keaton), who starts the story looking comfortable and not particularly interested in static. He and his second wife, lovely Anna (Chandra West), live in a fabulous, simultaneously spacious, and acutely angled house. He’s an architect in Washington state, and she’s an “international author”, whatever that means. They share a sincere affection for one another, as well as for John’s son Mikey (Nicholas Elia), the product of a previous marriage. Their morning routine is sweet and mutually supportive – he’s headed to his huge firm downtown, and she’s going to check the cover design for her latest novel – and it’s only briefly interrupted by Anna’s announcement: she’s pregnant.

Cue the death knell.

White Noise falls into that least-likely-to-succeed genre, the horror film released in winter. It’s good-looking and nonsensical, beginning with a vaguely creepy set of effects (phones ringing, lights flickering, clocks ticking), then falls apart swiftly and tepidly. All this is attributed to EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon), that is, the dead’s communications with the living through recordable audio and video transmissions. Alas, White Noise doesn’t quite muster interest in characters on either side of the divide.

As if he’s got a clue, John doesn’t leap immediately into the EVP business. He needs to be convinced, and Anna’s ostensible afterlife persistence is apparently all too eager to do that work. She calls him from her cell (static on her end) and flicks the lights at 2:30 am, the hour of her mysterious death. In fact, her death was so mysterious that local authorities didn’t even know she was dead for weeks, as they sought the body and eventually pieced together an “accident” scenario to explain her washing up on a shore miles from where her car is discovered. This means that John spends some wrenching hours and days imagining she’s not dead, which is observed with increasing alarm by his ex-wife (Sarah Strange) and young son, and maybe a person or two at the office. White Noise seems intent on isolating John, perhaps to indicate his increasing immersion into his self, or perhaps to cut down on expensive speaking parts.

When at last, John buries Anna (in one of those graveyard scenes where the camera shoots from overhead to emphasize the vast space of loss and grief that John, at least, is feeling), he then visits Raymond (Ian McNeice), whose son was killed years ago, and who now channels his grief and frustration into the pursuit of EVP. He claims to have received a message from Anna. John is all too ready to pick his way through Raymond’s cluttered home, filled with sophisticated recording equipment and boxes of files, and the copious notes he’s taken. Raymond receives nearly indecipherable communications from “beyond” (these range from nice hellos to relatives to the outright nasty “get out!” sort of warnings typically hurled at those pesky humans who can’t leave the dead alone; see also: Poltergeist, Amityville Horror, The Ring.)

Undeterred, John and Raymond pursue Anna’s recordable traces, John in part encouraged by another of Raymond’s “clients”, the perpetually sorrowful bookstore owner Sarah (played, appropriately, by the perpetually sorrowful Deborah Kara Unger). As she’s had her own experience contacting a dead person, she’s willing to support John’s increasing obsession with hearing Anna’s voice through the static sound. He buys a pile of expensive equipment and ignores his preternaturally patient child to watch all that static on his screen. (Why do they have so many TVs? wonders cute little Mikey. So they can both watch their own “shows” at the same time, Daddy explains). The trouble is, Mikey’s shows – ghost cartoons, the local news _ are a lot more interesting than John’s. Still, White Noise does its best to immerse you in John’s experience, which means looking at a lot of static.

To oblige your immersion, White Noise has to rig its logic, which means removing any characters who might insert something into the proceedings – by death or other means. One Detective Smits (Mike Dopud) questions John’s strange involvement in a series of fatalities, but Smits is never a factor in how events unfold. He’s an afterthought, always late on the scene and never comprehending what’s happening. He’s something of an audience stand-in; you too might feel stranded on the sidelines as White Noise makes less and less sense.

While it’s not hard to predict the broad strokes of Niall Johnson’s script – the dead wife, the haunted husband, the fatal consequences of his “meddling” – the particular turns John takes to communicate with Anna are slightly less obvious. But it’s clear soon that the film has dug (or written) itself into a rather sizeable logical hole from which there is no convincing emergence.

At the same time, Sax (an erstwhile Dr. Who director) and cinematographer Chris Seager make terrific use of White Noise‘s thematic interest in static. To indicate John’s simultaneous loss of self and slide into self, the film has him literally scritch off the screen. He becomes static. It’s a striking effect and gestures toward critiquing the culture that invests in such non-reflective abstraction and emptiness. Indeed, it almost indicts your desire to see something in nothing.

But White Noise doesn’t look too deeply into its premise. Instead, it jerry-rigs a climax and a bit of a sequel-supposing last shot, without putting much heart into either. You’re left feeling only the void at its center.