White Noise (2005)

White Noise, the 2005 supernatural thriller from director Geoffrey Sax, concerns an architect named Jonathan Rivers, played by Michael Keaton, whose wife drowns and who then becomes consumed by electronic voice phenomena in the hope of hearing her again. What follows is static, obsession, three demons, and a great deal of rain. For those of us who sit in judgment of a film's cultural temperature, it arrives as an unusually blank specimen, a document with almost nothing to say about the way we live now.

The cast is overwhelmingly white. A handful of minority performers appear as a reporter, a voice on a recording, a detective, and the film never remarks on them, which is the honest way to do it and also the reason there is nothing here to score. Anna is a best-selling author and Sarah owns a bookstore, yet both are defined by bereavement and a wheelchair. No argument about their place in the world is made. Jonathan himself is a comfortable architect, so the class critique never arrives. There is no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent interiority, no revision of the historical record. The movie is indifferent to all of it, and its indifference has the flat, clean quality of a specimen slide.

What the film offers instead is menace. A psychic issues warnings, a construction worker confesses under demonic control, and limbs are broken on camera. The closing intertitle, a statistic about threatening EVP messages, exists to send us home unsettled, not instructed. It is a haunted house with a cassette deck. That it turned a profit in the dead of January, and spawned a better-regarded sequel two years later, says more about studio scheduling than about the film's conscience. We file it accordingly.