The Signal
Written and Directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush & Jacob Gentry
Technology is one of the few major preoccupations of modern society that predates 2001. At the box office, sci-fi dread has a populist appeal: The Matrix imagined life as a computer-processed nightmare, and Minority Report suggested imperfection in the utopian dream of systematically ending violence. The recent commercial success of Cloverfield showed that Hollywood could easily exploit 9/11 anxieties for entertainment value, overruling the need for narratives exploring the frighteningly intangible threat of media saturation. Fortunately, there’s The Signal, the brilliant independent production from a close-knit gang of Atlanta-based filmmakers released this week. It takes this frequently neglected issue to task with McLuhanean efficiency, but it’s also one badass horror film.
In structure and content, The Signal plays out like a cautionary quasi-zombie comedy for screen addicts. The threat lurks on mangled television and radio signals, hence the inescapable doom. An unknown code unleashed on the airwaves sends residents of the fictional city Terminus (and, presumably, the rest of the world) declining into madness—residents roam the streets on murderous rampages, unwittingly trusting their insanity. Fragile beauty Mya (Anessa Ramsey) comes home to her husband Lewis (A.J. Bowen) in time to watch reality unravel: The tube blasts jumbled colors like a Winamp visualizer on speed and Lewis devolves into a deranged maniac. She thinks he suspects her liaison with her true love, Ben (Justin Welborn), the story’s conventional hero, but it quickly become obvious that the whole town has gone nuts. And so the battle for survival begins.
Nothing in The Signal is definite—we don’t know what caused the breakout or why some characters go loony faster than others—but it’s that precise slipperiness that makes the premise so freaky. Like Lost or your average David Lynch oddity, causation comes secondary to the increasingly fascinating portrait of those forced to react to it. After Mya flees her ramshackle apartment, the perspective shifts to her angered spouse, Ben’s plight and another household of crazed personalities. But the movie retains a consistent emotional hook: the uphill struggle to reconcile inexplicable dreaminess with authentic experience.
Because violence drives the suspense, The Signal fits the implicitly visceral grid of the horror genre, but its tonal range is fascinating. Dividing into three segments, each directed by a different individual (David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry), the movie careens from contemplative thriller to outlandish comedy and winds up somewhere in-between, mimicking the confused subjectivity of its ill-fated subjects. The performances are fantastically savage reflections of this shrewd what-the-fuck representation. (Bowen and Scott Poythress, as a scientifically minded fellow who goes completely bonkers, demonstrate the greatest capacity for oscillating between psychosis and uncertain sobriety.) There’s an irony to Ben’s suave proposal that he and Mya “fuck our way to freedom,” because their freedom is fucked.
When it premiered last year at Sundance (where it landed an unexpectedly strong distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures), The Signal navigated complaints that the premise contained a noticeable similarity to Stephen King’s phone-zombie tome Cell. Never mind that the Atlantans had their project underway before King’s book hit stands, because the movie is quite different and much better than the written work, anyway. King’s plot, which begins with a pulse that turns cell users into bloodthirsty beasts, relies too much on a contrived us-versus-them setup. The survivors are the folksy sorts who don’t use cells (Ho ho! Take that, civilization!), whereas everybody in The Signal is subjected to the ubiquitous disease, and it’s impossible to discern the precise moment when somebody gets “infected,” or if we’ve adopted the demented perspective ourselves. Wildly apocalyptic about contemporary obsessions, The Signal depicts the global village as a mass media slaughterhouse.
Written and Directed by David Bruckner, Dan Bush & Jacob Gentry
Technology is one of the few major preoccupations of modern society that predates 2001. At the box office, sci-fi dread has a populist appeal: The Matrix imagined life as a computer-processed nightmare, and Minority Report suggested imperfection in the utopian dream of systematically ending violence. The recent commercial success of Cloverfield showed that Hollywood could easily exploit 9/11 anxieties for entertainment value, overruling the need for narratives exploring the frighteningly intangible threat of media saturation. Fortunately, there’s The Signal, the brilliant independent production from a close-knit gang of Atlanta-based filmmakers released this week. It takes this frequently neglected issue to task with McLuhanean efficiency, but it’s also one badass horror film.
In structure and content, The Signal plays out like a cautionary quasi-zombie comedy for screen addicts. The threat lurks on mangled television and radio signals, hence the inescapable doom. An unknown code unleashed on the airwaves sends residents of the fictional city Terminus (and, presumably, the rest of the world) declining into madness—residents roam the streets on murderous rampages, unwittingly trusting their insanity. Fragile beauty Mya (Anessa Ramsey) comes home to her husband Lewis (A.J. Bowen) in time to watch reality unravel: The tube blasts jumbled colors like a Winamp visualizer on speed and Lewis devolves into a deranged maniac. She thinks he suspects her liaison with her true love, Ben (Justin Welborn), the story’s conventional hero, but it quickly become obvious that the whole town has gone nuts. And so the battle for survival begins.
Nothing in The Signal is definite—we don’t know what caused the breakout or why some characters go loony faster than others—but it’s that precise slipperiness that makes the premise so freaky. Like Lost or your average David Lynch oddity, causation comes secondary to the increasingly fascinating portrait of those forced to react to it. After Mya flees her ramshackle apartment, the perspective shifts to her angered spouse, Ben’s plight and another household of crazed personalities. But the movie retains a consistent emotional hook: the uphill struggle to reconcile inexplicable dreaminess with authentic experience.
Because violence drives the suspense, The Signal fits the implicitly visceral grid of the horror genre, but its tonal range is fascinating. Dividing into three segments, each directed by a different individual (David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry), the movie careens from contemplative thriller to outlandish comedy and winds up somewhere in-between, mimicking the confused subjectivity of its ill-fated subjects. The performances are fantastically savage reflections of this shrewd what-the-fuck representation. (Bowen and Scott Poythress, as a scientifically minded fellow who goes completely bonkers, demonstrate the greatest capacity for oscillating between psychosis and uncertain sobriety.) There’s an irony to Ben’s suave proposal that he and Mya “fuck our way to freedom,” because their freedom is fucked.
When it premiered last year at Sundance (where it landed an unexpectedly strong distribution deal with Magnolia Pictures), The Signal navigated complaints that the premise contained a noticeable similarity to Stephen King’s phone-zombie tome Cell. Never mind that the Atlantans had their project underway before King’s book hit stands, because the movie is quite different and much better than the written work, anyway. King’s plot, which begins with a pulse that turns cell users into bloodthirsty beasts, relies too much on a contrived us-versus-them setup. The survivors are the folksy sorts who don’t use cells (Ho ho! Take that, civilization!), whereas everybody in The Signal is subjected to the ubiquitous disease, and it’s impossible to discern the precise moment when somebody gets “infected,” or if we’ve adopted the demented perspective ourselves. Wildly apocalyptic about contemporary obsessions, The Signal depicts the global village as a mass media slaughterhouse.
