Whoever put together the teaser trailer for the limp new thriller White Noise should have been hired to direct the movie, since the teaser, with its creepy, ambient sounds, ominous on-screen titles and disturbing visuals, was probably one of the scariest things you could see at the movies in recent months. It also included no footage from the actual movie, which was probably a smart move, since White Noise the film is a tired, muddled and unoriginal thriller whose only scares come from cheap jump moments.
It joins a number of recent allegedly scary movies whose scares reside only in their trailers. Godsend, The Forgotten and Saw, to name a few, came off far better as disjointed series of images that illustrated their generally intriguing premises than they did as feature-length films. Perhaps someday a forward-thinking home video company will release a DVD compilation of those pulse-pounding trailers.
In the meantime, we have to make do with stuff like White Noise, in which architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton, who really deserves better) loses his wife (Chandra West) to an accident and starts hearing messages from her in the titular sounds: static on radios, televisions, answering machines and other pieces of technology. White Noise goes out of its way to pretend that it's grounded in reality—specifically something called electronic voice phenomena—while casually ditching its supposed premise in favor of generic horror-movie hooey whenever it's convenient.
At first, Jonathan is an EVP skeptic when contacted by the avuncular Raymond (Ian McNeice) with claims that his wife is attempting to communicate from the great beyond. But he quickly not only buys into the phenomenon but also becomes obsessed himself, working alongside another EVP believer (Deborah Kara Unger) to contact his dead wife and help others talk to loved ones who've passed on. Or at least he does until the filmmakers decide that's not interesting, and Jonathan needs to be chasing some supernatural evildoers like every other protagonist in every other horror movie.
There's barely 20 minutes left of the film by the time writer Niall Johnson and director Geoffrey Sax get around to the point, and it's as confusing and unsatisfying as you'd expect with so little time to build suspense. Sax, a British TV veteran making his feature debut, borrows heavily from recent Asian-influenced horror movies like The Ring and The Grudge, grounding his scares in high-tech, flat-screen TVs and sleek, new computers. Jonathan even lives in an ultra-modern, steel-and-glass apartment building, and the film's slick, metallic look is far more interesting than its pedestrian story.
In the end the swipes from pseudo-science and more inventive films serve only to put a thin gloss on the thin plot, and unsuccessfully cover up the lack of originality in the script. Anyone intrigued by the effective trailer and tempted to see this film would be advised to follow the lead of Jonathan's first wife, who does the only sensible thing when the voices in the static move on to haunt her at the end of the film: She turns them off.