White Noise (2005)

MOVIE #1,177 • 🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿 • 10.05.23 50 MOVIES IN 32 DAYS! I have no idea how to write this review. I kept thinking there had to be some twist coming because this is just the stupidest one-note premise. They never try to explain how they're actually doing what the whole movie is about (that being: recording the voices and occasional images of dead people onto VHS tapes via TV static — AKA EVP, or the “electronic voice phenomenon” which is a ghost-hunting thing that I have no familiarity with and seems like hokum). On some level, maybe this is for the better. If they'd have tried to get into the weeds with all that, this would have been even worse. And this movie has a 7% RT score

There's no explanation that would have been anything other than dumb. And since the movie is already dumb, this is actually just a smart business decision. But a lot of the visuals, and especially the final minutes — while incoherent — are stylized in a way that drew me in. Michael Keaton discovers that the killer is just some guy he passed in an elevator earlier in the movie (but he’s really being controlled by evil spirits) then he falls to his death and talks to his son over the AM radio before one final twist and an inane postscript…


At the end of the day, this is just one of those aggressively stupid movies that speaks to me. I don't know why. Perhaps my mind is a husk. Where I used to seek to fill it up with vivid wonder now any white noise will do. Volume over virtue. The widest lake before the tallest peak. So that's what I do.

I have never been more flummoxed about what score to give a movie. Pick one out of a hat. In fact, that’s exactly what I did…


One more insane thing to mention is that this thing made 90 millions on just a $10m budget! And it spawned a sequel to two years later!! The mid 00s were SO DRUNK!!!

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White Noise is a 2005 supernatural horror thriller film directed by Geoffrey Sax and starring Michael Keaton and Deborah Kara Unger. The title refers to electronic voice phenomena (EVP), where anomalous voice-like sounds, which some believe to be from the "other side" — interpreted as spirit voices, are found on electronic audio recordings. It was released on January 7, 2005.