THE SIGNAL

Interpersonal violence that's surprisingly smart

By DAVID WILDMAN

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For anyone that's ever held the hope that horror movies can be exciting without being idiotic, here's a film that's as bloody as Saw and Turistas, but is also smart, entertaining and surprisingly funny. The Signal takes the sci-fi grittiness of early Cronenberg and then mixes in dark, weirdly whimsical exchanges of dialogue where the identities of the characters constantly shift around as they take turns trying to kill each other. It's like a splatter film written by Pinter.

It opens with a prism of undulating color and a loud, jarring low-frequency tone. The camera pulls out and we see this is playing on a TV screen in a dark room. A young woman, Mya (Anessa Ramsey) is getting dressed while a man tries to talk her back into bed. She tries to make a call, but her cellphone won't work. It's soon established they've just had an illicit quickie and she's leaving to go back to her husband. The man in bed, Ben (Justin Welborn), a goateed, tattooed hipster, tries to get her to run away with him, entreating her with prose that is romantic and cheesy, but just weird enough to be intriguing. He pleads with her to meet him at the airport the next day to blow town together, then hands her a mix CD he's made. She puts it in her Walkman and heads home, non-committal.

When she gets back to her apartment building, her husband, Lewis (AJ Bowen), fires intimidating questions about where she was, who she was with and what she ordered to drink and eat. This comes off as his usual behavior—being a controlling dickhead. Then, Lewis proceeds to bash one of his guest's head in with a baseball bat. This, we figure, is probably not so normal for him. From here on in, things only get more harrowing, as Mya escapes and we find that overnight the entire city has fallen victim to hideous, nonsensical violence.

The central part of the film takes place later the next day, before a New Year's Eve celebration at an apartment a few blocks away. Socialite Anna (Cheri Christian) tries to keep up with party preparations despite it obviously being the end of the world and her having just killed her husband because he tried to strangle her. First, her landlord, Clark (Scott Poythress), shows up. He's fresh from having randomly beheaded somebody, but also seems to be aware that the TV broadcasts have been manipulating people's brainwaves through electromagnetic fields, causing them to revert to a primitive state. Ordinarily you would think he's a nut, but in light of what's happening, he comes off as insightful. Then Lewis arrives, covered in blood and armed with a canister of poisonous bug spray, convinced that Anna's really his wife, Mya.

In the third part of the film we see things from the perspective of Ben, who shows up at Mya's apartment to confront her husband, finds him duct taped to a chair and foolishly lets him go, unleashing all the rest of the events of the film.

The Signal's trio of fledgling director/writers David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry, have effectively portrayed a massive collapse of civilization by wisely focusing on one love triangle and letting you imagine that it's a microcosm of what's happening all over the city. They've also managed to write characters and direct actors that come as both interesting and funny without being precious. It's quite a feat to get these blood-covered protagonists to swing unpredictably from perpetrators of wanton acts of death to innocent survivors of some otherworldly malicious mayhem. I greatly look forward to whatever sort of vivid madness these people come out with next.

THE SIGNAL

RATED | R

OPENS | 2.22.08