White Noise
Michael Keaton's performance in "White Noise," a moronic exercise in supernatural claptrap, consists of two activities: squinting at TV screens and squinting at the other actors. Only he can say for sure which half of his acting here has inspired the other. If only he'd devoted as much time to squinting at the script for a reasonable explanation as to what the devil this movie is about.
Keaton plays the imaginatively named John, an architect who thinks his drowned wife is communicating with him from the Other Side. A rotund Englishman (Ian McNeice) hips John to electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP, in which the dead use devices like toasters and television sets to talk to the living. Apparently, EVP practitioners can hear these voices only by building an elaborate system that tracks and records ambient sound and disembodied voices. The setup looks like Circuit City came to install a bunch of equipment in Keaton's old Batcave. John takes his data to Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), a widow who swears by EVP.
John does discover why his late wife has been bugging him, and it makes the movie seem a little like that new Patricia Arquette show, "Medium." Here, though, the dead aren't very useful. All they'll say to John is "help" or "get out." But if there's trouble somewhere or a life to save, every bit of information must be mumbled because much sleuthing must be done to get this movie past the 60-minute mark.
"White Noise" should not be mistaken with the Don DeLillo novel of the same name, though this film seems to be the embodiment of the "toxic airborne event" rhapsodized in that book. The movie is desperate to lure people looking for something that reminds them of "The Ring," "Signs," "The Sixth Sense," "Ghost," "Ghostbusters," or "Poltergeist." This, in fact, is the sort of diminished knockoff that could have benefited from a little Whoopi Goldberg or the appearance of a giant destructive marshmallow.
Instead, we get a movie that takes itself far too seriously, yet not seriously enough. The EVP lobby deserves better than scene after scene of Keaton racing the clock and running around the dampest, dimmest parts of Vancouver, attempting to save people who are about to die.
Meanwhile, to make sure we don't sleep the whole movie away, occasionally something will go bump in the night that will make only the most spook-able among us jump. But this is a brain-dead drama exploiting the frills of a thriller. I don't want to know why a serial killer materializes; or why a character who's had no suicidal urges leaps from a balcony; or how, despite having been associated with a handful of deaths, John never quite becomes a suspect. Is detective work in British Columbia that lax?
If the director, Geoffrey Sax, or the screenplay by Niall Johnson contributed a drop of intelligence or cared for metaphysics, "White Noise" might have been watchable as some kind of cautionary tale about the perils of modern technology or the insatiable urges of the undead. But Sax is content to let the movie plod along for logy and vague stretches until it feels like a woeful waste of everything.
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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