Jonathan Rivers (Keaton) world turns upside down when his author wife (Chandra West) is found dead of an apparent accident. His grief turns him to a man named Raymond (McNeice) who does experiments with EVP Electronic Voice Phenomena. This phenomenon allows the dead to communicate with the living through machines and electronics. Raymond tells Jonathan that he is getting messages from his wife which drives him to invest in equipment and see, or hear for himself. This leads to an unhealthy obsession that gets out of hand fast. The EVP in this script is a cool idea and early on Director Geoffrey Sax uses this for a few solid jump scares and some genuine creepy moments. Unfortunately it runs out of steam quickly after these first few scenes. The second half of this movie just mail's it in and it definitely misses a good opportunity. The sound design is excellent but it is wasted on scenes that are just simply dull. The script is way too involved in Jonathan's obsession with the EVP and a simpler and straight forward approach by the writers and director would have helped a lot. This is certainly watchable, but instantly forgettable.

This is a tough subject matter to pull off and it helps if the Creators behind the Movie are passionate or at least literate about the obscure Paranormal Phenomenon that is being fictionalized.Gazing at a snowy TV screen like a Rorschach Test and discovering faint, barely recognizable images and listening for far away sounds that become almost decipherable, but not quite, or maybe so, is not the stuff of compelling Cinema. It is utilized here for some Suspense, but alas, it becomes too much of a not too good a thing.The Plot failing to make any coherent explanation of the Subject, and it is a Subject that requires more than cursory exposition, diverges and meanders as it adds Precognition to the Story and other extraneous stuff like manifestations and a deranged Killer, just for some Hollywood filler.Overall, it is a misguided attempt at Marketing a new twist to the Horror Movie Crowd and is an expensive exploitation with no regards, embarrassing itself with a Half-Baked product that could do no more than fill seats initially, with a clever Ad Campaign. But when those seats were empty after the first run, there was no place to hide from this poorly conceived disappointment.

As much as the beginning of the film had promise - happily married couple are destroyed by the wife dying in an apparently tragic accident - the fact that the grieving husband was receiving messages from his dead wife through white noise (reminiscent of Steven Spielberg's Poltergeist) seemed like a suspenseful plot until we understand it is to help other people who are about to die.I wanted his wife's communications to be about the exact nature of her own demise and that it had been far more sinister than it first appeared - which it was - but not in the way we want it to be. The fact that she was newly pregnant played out to virtually no significance. Unfortunately, there are too many unanswered questions and loose ends that leave the viewer with an overwhelming sense of frustration.I marked it down for being somewhat unsatisfied by it, while marking it up more for creating genuine fear and suspense.

Have you noticed how thrillers that begin with a happy family preparing for breakfast always means one of them will die? This is the screenwriter's way of preparing us to be sad when one of the family members die in an accident. "Hey, this a happy family, when one dies it's really really bad, ya'll!" And then the surviving family goes crazy or gets depressed for the rest of the film."White Noise" is a psychological thriller, where the exact above scenario occurs. Anna (Chandra West) dies in a car accident, leaving a grieving husband, John (Michael Keaton) behind to utter bad dialog that even Keaton can't make work. Soon, he is followed by a very fat man (hard not to notice, huh?) who tells him he can contact the dead. "Sure thing, I'd love to hear my dead wife talk", says Keaton. Suppose he is a in a happy marriage, because most married couples don't want to hear each other talk even when they're alive and kicking.But since this film is a thriller, lots of bad stuff begins to happen when the dead are called upon. The really fat guy dies, being crushed under a computer. If you can already see why this film is unintentionally funny, you're just enough intelligent to avoid seeing it.The film gets its worst grove on when the ending hits the screens. My guess is that the writer couldn't come up with one, so he threw in something that requires special effects and, like, would be cool. Like, it wasn't...