rchitect Jonathan Rivers (Keaton) gets great news: His novelist wife, Anna (West), is pregnant. But his elation crashes that night when Anna suddenly goes missing.
Police find Anna's car on the banks of the river, but no body and no sign of her. Rivers finds his life unraveling as the weeks drag on with no word of Anna's fate.
That's when he notices a fat man apparently stalking him. Confronted, the man identifies himself as Raymond (McNeice). And he has startling news. He has heard from Anna. From beyond the grave.
As Jonathan tries to leave, Raymond explains. There is something called electronic voice phenomenon, or EVP, through which the dead communicate in the "white noise" of electronic machines. "I can hear them," Raymond says. "I can see them. And I can record them."
Jonathan refuses to believe Raymond, holding out hope that Anna is still alive. But when the police finally deliver the bad news, Jonathan seeks Raymond out.
In Raymond's cluttered house, Jonathan meets Sarah (Unger), who tells Jonathan that she has heard from her dead fiance and been reassured that he is in a happier place. Jonathan then has his own revelation: He hears Anna's voice in a recording of radio static.
The brief contact galvanizes Jonathan, who begins to spend more and more time with Raymond and Sarah. When another tragedy strikes, Jonathan buys enough equipment to continue his search for Anna on his own.
But Anna is not the only voice and image he reaches. And as darkness descends, he receives ominous warnings: If the dead can come through, what else can?
A dreary, scrambled scarefest
Opening with a tantalizing quote from the father of modern technology, Thomas Edison, White Noise sets up an intriguing variation on the traditional ghost story: What if the dead could speak to us through the low-level static of our own ubiquitous electronic gadgetry?
The premise is based on a real-life subset of paranormal exploration, which examines purported messages from the beyond as captured in recordings of the electronic snow that surrounds us.
Unfortunately, that idea only goes so far, and White Noise is yet another in a long string of dreary, intermittently creepy genre films, a la The Mothman Prophecies, that ultimately fails to live up to its premise.
The movie is certainly stylish in the hands of British TV helmer Sax, whose ideas include multiple "God's-eye-view" shots and filming Keaton in an apartment block that looks like a giant TV set. But stylish direction can't salvage a script, by newcomer Johnson, whose twists and turns are predestined and obvious to anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the genre.
The movie is overly somber, and the scares are few and far between. The story is full of holes and violates its own rules almost as quickly as it sets them up. Johnson, moreover, seems to have constructed some kind of parable about the failure of communication in the modern age, but the metaphor is as fuzzy as a detuned TV set.
