WHITE NOISE
An ambitious attempt at a dramatic horror film falls apart thanks to fault script construction
By Steve Biodrowski
This reasonably ambitious attempt at creating a horror film with some dramatic weight collapses due to weak script construction. Michael Keaton stars as Jonathan Rivers, a successful businessman whose wife Ann (Chandra West) disappears. Not knowing whether she is alive or dead, Rivers is approached by a Raymond Price (Ian McNeice), who claims to have contacted Rivers' wife in the afterlife. Rivers is skeptical until the police confirm that his wife is indeed dead. Price introduces Rivers to Electronic Voice Phenomena (E.V.P), which consists of asking questions in an empty room while a tape recorder is running. The tape, when played back, contains answers from disembodied spirits. Rivers becomes obsessed with the phenomenon, buying an elaborate recording set-up to communicate with his late wife. Things turn bad when Price turns up dead, apparently killed by angry spirits from the other side. Rivers continued contact with the dead estranges him from what’s left of his family, and the spirit voices are soon sending him on a wild goose chase, trying to prevent more supernatural killings. Because he is always showing up at the scene of a crime, the police begin to suspect Rivers, until he manages to track down the real culprit—a business associate who has forged some kind of unexplained alliance with the deadly spirits.
WHITE NOISE begins like a mystery with dramatic undertones (dealing with the loss of a loved one, who might or might not have been murdered). Then the film moves into feel-good territory when Keaton’s character comes to believe that he can contact his dead wife through EVP. The script seems to want to say something about the psychological dangers of refusing to let go (Rivers' obsession with his new electronic toys is clearly supposed to be psychologically unhealthy), but the idea is pushed aside in favor of turning the film into a mechanical thriller, with Rivers rushing around trying to save lives and clear his own name. The final revelation of the real culprit is a hackneyed cliché; the character is so peripheral to the action that the “surprise” is totally unsatisfying, feeling like a desperate attempt to provide an un-guessable twist. Keaton gives a good performance as the obsessed widower mourning his wife, but that character arc is abandoned when the film turns from drama to scares, and by the time the story winds down to its conclusion we have disengaged to the point that it feels like watching an empty special effects show. The fear scenes are reasonably well done, and the effects do a decent job of conveying supernatural menace; however, they seem a bit dated in the wake of superior films like THE GRUDGE, which relied more on in-camera techniques. Overall, this is a decent time-waster that more or less holds your attention, but by the time it’s over you realize that it doesn’t add up to much of anything. TRIVIA The trailer for WHITE NOISE presents EVP as a genuine phenomenon: two voices heard on its soundtrack are supposed to be actual EVP recordings. EVP previously played a role in the novel LEGION, William Peter Blatty’s sequel to his previous book THE EXORCIST. One character in the novel makes EVP recordings; all of the messages in the book are transcriptions of recordings that Blatty actually made himself. (This element of the plot was abandoned when the novel was adapted into the film THE EXORCIST III.) .
