Susan Granger’s review of “White Noise” (Universal Pictures)
Egad! Is it too early to start assembling my Worst Pictures of 2005 list? In this wannabe suspense thriller, the life of architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) goes awry when his pregnant second wife, Anna (Chandra West), a best-selling writer, mysteriously disappears and dies. While in mourning, he is approached by Raymond Price (Ian McKneice), a paunchy fellow who says that Anna is trying to communicate with him through EVP, Electronic Voice Phenomenon. And when he receives two telephone calls from Anna’s cell phone, which he knows is turned off, he’s spooked, particularly when he meets Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger) who believes she has made contact with her late fiancŽ via EVP. It seems the static-like “white noise” of sound and images from TV sets and radios can be detected and recorded using a process known as video or photographic instrumental transcommunication. So Jonathan spends a lot of time in front of a fuzzy TV screen, obsessively determined to pick up Anna’s shadowy messages from the grave, even though he’s warned by a psychic (Connor Tracy) that he’d better be careful. Written by Niall Johnson and directed by BBC veteran Geoffrey Sax, it’s lethargic and ludicrous, filled with dark scenes against streams of backlighted rain. Mercifully, this creepy, supernatural ghost story clocks in at only 99 minutes. Unger and Keaton – who previously explored the afterlife in “Beetlejuice” and “Jack Frost” – underplay their roles, leaving the scene-chewing to the apparitions. Curiously, some of the intriguing, supposedly genuine recordings that appeared in the Coming Attractions never made it to the final cut. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “White Noise” is a silly, muddled, dismal 2. Anyone up for the Ouija board?
