Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) is a successful architect. His wife, Anna (Chandra West), leaves for work one morning and never returns. Her car is found near a river, but her body is not found. Remaining hopeful that she is still alive, Jonathan tries to continue his life. One day, he notices a man outside his house and, later, his office. When he confronts the man, he is told that Anna is dead. The man knows this because Anna has contacted him from “the other side.”
Jonathan dismisses him as a kook but, when Anna’s body is found, he seeks out the man to learn about how he was contacted. The man, named Raymond (Ian McNeice), tells Jonathan about EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) which is a method of recording voices that appear on tape seemingly from out of nowhere. These voices, Raymond alleges, are from people who have died and wish to contact the living. One of the voices is from Anna and, after hearing his dead wife, Jonathan is a believer. However, all of the messages Raymond and Jonathan hear are not simple “hellos” from the other side. Some of the messages are quite threatening and aggressive.
When Raymond turns up dead, Jonathan takes over his obsessive recording of voices from beyond hoping to again make contact with his dead wife. What he records seems to indicate that the dead aren’t just making contact, they might just be involved in murdering the living.
White Noise begins with a good plot device and an interesting premise. There are a few good scares and there’s a really creepy atmosphere that permeates the movie. Unfortunately, the script seems to lose its sense of self about halfway through the film, apparently not knowing where to go or what to do with what’s been set-up. Suddenly, the movie isn’t about voices from beyond the grave, it’s about spirits that possess people to do things they don’t want to do. There’s never any explanation as to any kind of motivation for the actions that are taking place. By the time White Noise ends, you don’t know anymore about what’s happened or why than you did before you watched the movie.
Michael Keaton, who hasn’t had a leading role in a major film in quite some time, seems to be overacting in a few scenes but, overall, he’s the best thing about White Noise. Without his charisma, I’d have stopped caring about his quest to solve the mystery of his wife’s death soon after her body was found. Unfortunately, the movie doesn’t come to a satisfactory conclusion, so I might have been better off not caring anyway.
1.5 out of 5.0 stars
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