WHITE NOISE (2005) **1/2 I like my horror to be a little scary and at least tenuously credible, usually, though those are more guidelines than rules. Really scary I can handle if it's great, and absurd I can.actually I may like absurd best of all. This one is scarier than most and predicated on Electronic Voice Phenomena, whereby the deceased allegedly communicate through radio (and here cell phone) circuitry. Ok, ghost in the machine like Sting said. I'll buy into it enough to see if there's a bang or a gag at the end. It's easy enough in the early going to see that this one will close with no gag. It could have predictably degenerated into unintentionally laughable, but Michael Keaton is a steady hand on the receiving side of the camera and Geoffrey Sax plays all of his cards right behind it; just enough bizarre obscurantism to keep you off balance, but not so much as to let you off track. And so it comes to pass that it's a track that you might want off of, but Michael won't leave it alone. Like an investor with diminishing returns, but just enough that he can't walk away. Chandra West and Deborah Karr Unger serve up varying portions of feminine mystique from perspectives of life and beyond and.it didn't miss being much bigger by much. The problem for me probably lies in EVP, relatively unproven and capitalizing on that dubious connection between the spiritual and mechanical. It seems less likely to me than dreams, for example. Authentic EVP recordings were used in the film, but of course they had to be augmented by fakes to coincide with the plot. I'm not convinced, but they do have me pondering the questions.
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