Michael Keaton plays a successful architect named Jonathan
Rivers who is married to an even more successful writer named Anna. Their life
is the picture perfect paradise until the day that Anna mysteriously disappears.
Her car was found abandoned by the water with a flat tire. The police
investigation drags on for several agonizing weeks, with nobody knowing whether
she fell into the water or was abducted. One morning, while going to work,
Jonathan discovers that a man in a Range Rover is tailing him. When he sees the
man sitting out his office, Jonathan confronts the man. He turns out to be
Raymond Price, and he claims that Anna is dead, and that she had contacted him
from the other side. He fully understands Jonathan's skepticism, and leaves him
a card to call should he ever want to talk.
When Anna does turn out to be dead, the victim of an accident while changing a
tire, Jonathan moves on with his life as best he can--until some creepy things
start happening. He receives phone calls from his dead wife's cell, which he has,
and one night at two thirty am-the very same time when Anna passed
away--Jonathan clearly hears his wife say his name on the answering machine.
Contacting Raymond Price, Jonathan winds up diving right into the eerie world of
Electronic Voice Phenomenon, where the voices and the images of the dead are
captured on recordings. Reportedly the legendary inventor Thomas A. Edison even
considered working on a machine that would enable the living to speak to the
dead, and his quote on this subject is the starting off point for White Noise.
As a good, scary movie, the film is superb. It's very effective in how it slowly
builds up an overwhelming sense of dread involving characters that we genuinely
care about. Keaton is solid as Jonathan, a sensible man who slowly becomes
entangled in a chilling supernatural mystery. And the vastly underrated actress
Deborah Kara Unger is wonderful as Sarah Tate, a woman who maintains contact
with her dead fiancé through EVP. However, while the film is very good overall,
a major fault is within the storyline, which blatantly ignores it's own rules at
the end. A movie, even a fantasy film like this, must adhere to its own set of
rules in order to work. If you're not going to follow your own rules, then why
should the viewer care? Another annoying aspect is how the film constantly uses
the cheap scare to keep the viewer on edge. After a startling revelation, we cut
to a scene with a tractor-trailer passing by, its horn honking as a loud,
deafening blare. I really HATE it when a filmmaker uses tawdry tactics like this,
especially in a genuinely scary film like White Noise, which doesn't need them.
Special features on the DVD include an excellent, informative commentary by the
film's director and Keaton, deleted scenes, as well as a trio of documentaries
that offer a look into real-life EVP sessions. Despite the minor faults of White
Noise, it's still a gripping, absorbing thriller. Be sure to watch it with the
lights on.
--SF
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