White Noise, or Can You Hear Me Now? The Movie

What happens to the dearly departed once they leave this mortal coil is perhaps the most universally pondered query and cinema is no stranger in trying to come up with a significant reply. However in its latest incarnation the answer seems to be repetitive (i.e. we've seen it before).

Submitted for your approval: One Jonathan Rivers (the always reliable Michael Keaton), a successful architect whose second marriage to the beautiful and talented writer Anna (the fetching Chandra West) seems to be heading for nothing but good news when she announces she's pregnant moments before a photo shoot for her new novel. Sadly these will be the last fond memories Jonathan will treasure.

Anna is killed in a freak accident while changing a tire she falls into the nearby waters and drowns leaving a distraught, grief-stricken husband who begins to question how he can possibly continue his life. Enter mysterious Brit Raymond Price (Ian McNeice) who informs the overwhelmed Rivers that Anna has been 'speaking' to him in an ethereal device known as EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) - communication thru the white noise static of audio devices and eventually a ghostly video format. Naturally Rivers is at first affronted and skeptical but then finds himself at Price's home where he is in the midst of 'session' with another begrieved client, Sarah Tate (the utterly sexy Deborah Kara Unger). It is here where Rivers gets a sample of just what Price has been trying to explain which sets the plotline of the film.

Rivers becomes obsessed and convinced he can make contact with his late wife and will stop at nothing - including his good mental health and further distancing from his first wife and child (Sara Strange and Nicholas Elia, respectively) in the process - until he stumbles upon some nefarious signals from the great beyond testing his thought process and eventually tapping into something that was perhaps best left alone.

“White Noise” taps into many other (and better envisioned) sources of the ghostly genre including a score of old "Twilight Zone"'s, "Poltergeist", 'The Changeling", "Audrey Rose", "The Sixth Sense" and "The Ring" to name several off the top of my head. Namely how we the living try to comprehend the world of the dead and the afterlife (if one even does occur) and largely opening a Pandora's box of inexplicable evil while attempting to cope with one's own mortality.

The screenplay by newcomer Niall Johnson makes the most of its "X-Files" approach and for the most part the familiarity falls into place predictably yet Brit TV vet Geoffrey Sax (making his big-screen directorial debut) also elicits a few jolts for good measure in the creaky vehicle for Keaton who arguably is the best thing about the film as a whole, down playing his normal kinetic fueled turns with a vastly introspective and amiably obsessed Rivers (you truly feel his pain and desperation invested by this consuming project he enlists to) and the underused (sadly) Unger makes a fine fellow traveler downplaying her sexy visage. Kudos also to a viscerally uneasy turn by the lush Connor Tracy (late of "Final Destination 2") as a blind medium in a scene that begs for more screen time development.

The film however falls apart in the climactic final moments, which allows the next film in line to continue the quest for What Happens When We Die; only time will tell.

Film Rating: êê  (out of 4)