When Mya arrives home, Lewis seems to know exactly what's been going on, and his jealousy has a scary edge to it. But Lewis seems to be acting even more unhinged than Mya is accustomed to as he starts to threaten his buddies with a baseball bat. Soon Mya realizes that almost everyone in the apartment building is agitated and violent. As Mya looks down the hall she sees husbands killing wives, neighbors attacking neighbors, it's a bloodbath. Mya is paralyzed with fear and all she can think to do is hole up in the apartment across the hall and hope it all blows over. But of course it doesn't.
The filmmaking trio behind The Signal. (Magnolia Pictures)
The writing-directing team of David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush have broken their film into three distinct but chronologically consecutive segments called "transmissions." The first transmission is Crazy in Love, and focuses on Mya's point of view during these crucial first hours of the growing panic. Bruckner oversees this intense intro. The second part is Jealousy Monster . It moves the story to the home of a couple about to have an Ozzie and Harriet style cocktail party but then the craziness hits. It's written and directed by Gentry. And the concluding transmission by Bush, entitled Escape From Terminus , follows Ben's desperate attempt to track down Mya as the world appears to be coming to an end.
Now any film that chooses to name the town in its horror tale Terminus is letting you know right off the bat that things don't look good for the characters involved. The filmmakers also use a cover of the Joy Division song Atmosphere to further define the tone of the film - the song adds moody romance to the doom and gloom. The lyrics warn: "See the danger/Always danger... Your confusion/My illusion/Worn like a mask of self-hate." Danger and confusion both infuse this film as people you think you know suddenly and inexplicably turn homicidal. The urge to kill is so powerful that people will turn to any weapon, no matter how bizarre, to inflict damage. And if no weapon is around, hands and teeth will do just fine. It becomes a deadly game as each person you encounter you have to quickly evaluate - have they turned mad or are they sane? Will they try to kill you or are they as terrified and sane as you?
Eventually, people start to deduce that the TVs are sending out a signal or transmission that is somehow affecting everyone's thoughts and perception of the world. People seem driven to kill others in some sort of perverse sense of self-preservation, as if they NEED to kill as much as they need to breath teh air. Turning off the TVs helps a bit, and some people, like Mya, seem less affected than others.
The first segment is a brilliant work of contemporary horror. Bruckner knows how to build tension and a mounting sense of unease that explodes into full-blown chaos and paranoia. There's a point at which one man, who insists he's not touched with the madness, hooks up with Mya. He turns violent but neither he nor the audience is quite sure if he's been affected by the transmission or if he has simply become justifiably paranoid based on the violence surrounding him. After all, if everyone you see is killing someone else, is it unreasonable to fear for your life and kill anyone who approaches you? In this first segment, the film develops a true sense of gnawing, constricting terror. Although the notion of a transmission that can change the world requires a leap of faith to believe, everything else that follows has a chilling reality to it. Bruckner also taps into a notion that the best horror films look to -- that the most terrifying things are not threats from the outside but the darkness that lurks in our hearts.
The incongruous trio of killers in The Signal (Magnolia Pictures)
The second segment, Jealousy Monster, by Gentry, arrives like a breath of fresh air after the relentless tension of the first part. Gentry's segment brings the chaos into a confined space of one apartment, and gives it a comic twist. Clark (Scott Poythress) is a landlord and Anna (Cheri Christian) is one of his tenants. When he checks in on her he finds the prim, proper and polite young woman in a bit of a panic. She has a party starting shortly and she's just killed her husband. What's a hostess to do? What do you serve with dead husband and what happens when when a guest reveals that he's taken someone's head off? These are not things Miss Manners prepares you for. The section draws heavily on the tone of films such as the recent zombie spoof Fido and the cannibal comedy Parents . It has a very 50s sitcom feel with a Technicolor splash of production design. Anna is perfect in cheery pink and with her unusual weapon of choice -- hubby's golf club. The black humor in this scene is initially refreshing. It allows us some breathing space after the paranoid claustrophobia of Bruckner's piece. But Gentry's segment drags on for far too long, and without variation. This kind of horror comedy has been done before and done better (see Fido ), and what begins fresh grows as stale as the bodies piling up. The segment neither't advances the story nor add much beyond those initial nervous laughs.
Bush's final segment Escape from Terminus , returns us in part to the tone of the open. But it's hard to reboot the tension that was so carefully ratcheted up in the beginning, and then abandoned for the Ozzie and Harriet slasher sitcom. Bush also tries to return us to a certain level of humanity as he hones in on Ben and his quest to find Mya. But as with a number of similar themed end-of-world flicks, The Signal doesn't quite know how to conclude - should it go for hope or total nihilism?
The film taps most obviously into Kiyoshi Kurosawa's recent J-horror film Pulse (but please do not look at the U.S. version or you may get the crazy notion to kill some studio exec). Kurosawa's film served up a much more provocative and intellectual take on technology and the end of the world, but neither film is able to find a satisfying way to wrap everything up. Pulse becomes too ambiguous whereas The Signal narrows its focus to two people who somehow hope love can save them. Neither delivers the punch that needs to close each story.
Could Mya be the cause of all the chaos? (Magnolia Pictures)
I don't mind that the film doesn't explain much about what's going on. Clark has a hilarious bit of exposition relying on Star Trek to make sense of it all. But ultimately the filmmakers just present a "what if" scenario - what if everyone just went mad? What would that be like? No explanation, no alien invasion, no government conspiracy, it just happens. You can speculate though. I thought back to the opening shots of the film, the horror gorefest playing on TV. What if the mood of that film - extreme violence and fear - was what was being transmitted? The TV goes bad during the film and it's almost like that film becomes frozen in time, like a record stuck in a groove and repeating the same note over and over again until it drives everyone crazy. Maybe it's that moment intensified and made so unbearable that people have to release that fear and violence. I could buy into that.
The Signal (rated R for strong bloody brutal violence throughout, pervasive language and brief nudity) reveals killer horrors skills on the part of Bruckner, and to a lesser extent of Gentry and Bush. So if you don't mind a film that starts strong and finishes weak, check The Signal out. Or maybe you can convince the kid at the box office to sell you one-third a ticket, and could just check out Crazy in Love and leave. It's a shame that a film with so much potential fails to deliver in the end. But I haven't felt this creeped out at a movie in a long time and for that I'm grateful to Bruckner.
P.S. I love the name of their website www.doyouhavethecrazy.com , it sums up the film nicely.
