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Directed by Geoffrey SaxCast
Michael Keaton (Jonathan Rivers)
Deobarah Kara Unger (Sarah Tate)
Ian McNeice (Raymond Price)
Chandra West (Anna Rivers)
Sarah Strange (Jane)
Mike Dopud (Detective Smits)
Connor Tracy (Mirabelle Keegan)
You have to give Universal Pictures’ publicity department credit for the job they did on this January release horror film. Through shameless promotion of the movie’s EVP angle (electronic voice phenomenon, or the Evangelical People’s Party of Switzerland, the movie is not clear on this point), the concept that the dead can somehow find ways to communicate with the living through static on radio and television, they boosted the film to a number one weekend and pulled in a good overall take ($91 million worldwide) for their modest investment. White Noise and Hide and Seek made a normally tepid January film-going season a minor success for scary movies.
EVP is, of course, completely bogus. Despite the opening and closing title cards that give a scientific aura to the idea of the dead speaking through electronic means, no serious scientists study EVP, just as they don’t study most occult and paranormal ‘phenomenon’ like tarot cards, pat-life regression, and astrology. Standard logic will tell you that EVP is what happens after you spend days upon days listening to static and staring at snow on your TV. I would start to imagine that John Bonham was trying to tell me something from beyond the grave, too.
Nonetheless, White Noise hasn’t much to do with the touted EVP of the promotional campaign and more to do with the success of the U.S. version of The Ring (2003). EVP gets the movie rolling, but White Noise isn’t interested in giving the audience a metaphysical lesson or a defense of the methods the characters use to contact the dead. It just wants to crawl up your spine, make you jump a bit, and make you leave the theater (or turn off your DVD player) feeling just a bit creepier for the wear. On those unambitious grounds, the film succeeds. It won’t haunt you like The Exorcist or even the lesser effectiveness of The Ring, but it makes for decent night of horror at home with the DVD player.
From the moment we see Michael Keaton as architect Jonathan Rivers living a contented life with his loving and successful writer wife Anna (Chandra West), we know somebody is gonna die. And when Anna announces her pregnancy…well, you don’t need to be a psychic—or Syd Field—to predict who’s gonna get it. Anna vanishes and her body later shows up in the river, the victim of an apparent accident. Jonathan goes into the typical movie gray-funk, although Keaton’s solid performance does make the grieving believable. Then a mysterious stranger shows up in Jonathan’s life: Raymond Price (Ian McNeice), a student of EVP who claims that Anna has made attempts to contact him, and he has tapes of her voice calling through static channels.
Jonathan buys into the EVP premise with surprising celerity, but White Noise in general takes psychic abilities for granted and doesn’t dabble in any skepticism to slow the story down. It might all feel completely absurd if Keaton weren’t so damned ernest about his quest to contact his dead wife through staring at static on television screens and listening to dead radio channels through earphones. 
Deobarah Kara Unger, another of Price’s EVP clients, helps with the general ernestness of the situation, even if she serves scant purpose in the story aside from giving Keaton someone to talk to aside from the television.
And yes, we do see a lot of footage of people studying white snow on their television sets while the titular “white noise” plays in 5.1 Dolby Surround. However, director Geoffrey Sax and his cast do a good job at keeping the film edgy and suspenseful during these scenes through clever use of sudden sound intrusions and flashing shock imagery. The sound design in White Noise is perhaps its greatest asset, causing extreme jolts and giving hints of the sinister forces that slowly start to emerge from Jonathan’s dabbling with eavesdropping on the dead.
The mysterious threats—represented as three black figures that recur amidst the static—start to send the movie away from EVP gimmick and into the realm of the psychic thriller and serial killer mystery. White Noise plateaus in the freakiness department at about its middle span, and never reaches toward the next level of fear. The doom-laden atmosphere of horror prevalent at the opening never comes through strongly enough at the end as it seems to promise. At least the tension never dips back down below that level, and the ending works as on an emotional level even if it leaves behind too many questions.
Watching Michael Keaton go through the paces of a grieving husband who turns into an obsessive occult seeker makes me wonder what exactly happened to his career. In the late 1980s he had a reputation as one of the best comic actors around, and his dramatic career had started to take off with the gritty Clean and Sober (1988). Then he starred in Batman and Batman Returns as the Dark Knight and he hit superstardom level, but faded quickly after that. Now he does secondary roles in films like Herbie: Fully Loaded and First Daughter. Even though White Noise doesn’t give Keaton any Oscar material with which to work, he still does an excellent job with a part that most other actors would have misplayed into anonymity. Some producer needs to find him a new starring vehicle to tap into his talents; a fine actor is a terrible thing to waste.
Keaton at least boosts this middlebrow thriller up from the world of the dead and into the realm of the watchable. White Noise does make for better viewing than static…a whole lot better…and that’s as good a compliment as it deserves.
("Uhm, The Dead, could you turn down your radio, please?")