VCR Seance
White Noise Plays Ouija With Technology

The idea behind the new horror film White Noise is that contacting the dead (like everything else) has become easier with the help of modern science. After all, if we can call anyone in the country via cell phone, how much harder could it be to reach out and touch the dead? The story relies on the modern "science" of Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) to tell the tale. But if you can't buy into the premise of EVP, the story just won't work.

Luckily, the story has a very gullible hero named Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton). When he loses his wife in an auto accident, a strange man named Raymond (Ian McNeice) tells Jonathan that Anna (Chandra West) has been trying to reach him from the other side. It isn't long before Jonathan throws common sense to the wind and seeks out this "researcher." Calling Raymond a "scientist" is a bit like calling someone publishing a conspiracy newsletter in their basement a "serious journalist." He is a man who thinks the dead talk to him and he uses this information to help others.

The lack of cynicism in Jonathan is amazing. Even if, for the sake of pacing, the film couldn't devote a lot of time to his disbelief and eventual acceptance, it should still be present to some degree. For me, the hardest thing was watching one man become obsessed by this hokey phenomenon and try to pass it off as plausible.

The story trots on through a series of unlikely events after Jonathan finds himself taking up Raymond's crusade and acting as a go-between for the dead and the living. Convinced that his wife is guiding him from the other side, Jonathan tries to prevent tragedies from happening only to find himself at one accident scene after another. It's amazing that the cops don't arrest him just for that reason alone. When not staring sorrowfully at static-filled television screens, Jonathan is also investigating some "evil" voices that Raymond cataloged. These voices become the unseen monsters, the shadowy villains of the film.

One of the funniest lines in the movie (unintentional, I'm sure) is when Jonathan meets another of Raymond's clients named Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger). Sarah tells Jonathan that Raymond has helped her following the death of her fiancee because "he tells me what I want to hear." Seriously?! Isn't that what EVERY medium, soothsayer, oracle, and fortune teller does? Would John Edwards ever make money if he told his clients that their loved ones were burning in the seventh circle of hell?

The pacing of the film is slow at times. Even so, the story fails to go into detail when it should. I couldn't decide if the film was too long or too short. I told my girlfriend that this would either have made a good novel or a nice episode of "The Outer Limits."

What really sinks White Noise is not its reliance on EVP as a story mechanism. Jonathan's obsession with his wife's death and his desperation to believe that she is waiting for him on the other side is real enough. The problem is that the potentially better plot had nothing to do with whether or not EVP was real. By the end of the film, the monsters are no longer hidden and there is no question that the dead are speaking to Jonathan. Had the film left that question up in the air and made us ponder Jonathan's own sanity, it would have been a more interesting story.

If you want to know more about EVP, including some rather mundane explanations for it, you owe it to yourself to check out this website: Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal.

MY RATING: 4 out of 10.

RATED:
RUN TIME: 101 min.

VCR Seance White Noise Plays Ouija With Technology

VCR Seance
White Noise Plays Ouija With Technology