Starring: Michael Keaton, Deborah Kara Unger, Ian McNeice

3 out of 10 stars

If Atom Egoyan made movies for the Sci Fi Channel – okay, really bad movies for the Sci Fi Channel – you'd have something like White Noise, a tasteful, somber, and ultimately pointless thriller that meditates on death issues and somehow falls asleep in the process. Full of fuzzy feelings, extraneous children, and thoughtful pauses, it muddles through its techno-ghost plot with a sensitive gait, treating its dead-people-talking-through-static premise with an earnestness one usually reserves for tragedies too painful to address. And with its host of characters acting so damn serious among the environs of Vancouver, it's hard not to think that these Canadians somehow walked through some genre-twisting looking glass and, instead of crying over schoolchildren who perished on a bus, are instead shouldered with the burden of hearing voices from beyond the grave – through their TV, no less. Welcome to The Poltergeist Hereafter.

A quote from none other than Thomas Edison invokes the possibility that spirits from the other side, if they found the proper medium, would have lots and lots to say to us. EVP, or Electronic Voice Phenomenon, is the serious study (or so we're told) of messages being transported from the dead to the living in this manner. Architect Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton) discovers this when, after moping around for the first third of the movie over the death of his beatific wife, he's approached by a portly gentleman (Ian McNeice) who claims to have messages on videotape from his deceased love. Granted, they look like blank tapes, but he insists there's something there. Jonathan investigates, watches screens full of static in an attempt to make out some kind of message, and hears an extrasensory sound bite of his wife's voice. Soon he's in the full blush of obsession, attempting to communicate with her; she obliges with a few messages, but a trio of nasty ghosts, sounding like Mercedes McCambridge from The Exorcist, keep interrupting their audio-video correspondence. And it turns out her messages may have something more to do with present-day activities than anything beyond the grave. However, the quality and content of her messages is muddied and hard to decipher -- it appears that even in the 21st century, the preferred mode of communication for the dead is still videotapes, as the CD/DVD boom seems to have not had the opportunity to cross over to the other side yet.

The first half of White Noise is agreeable pulp, despite the fact that it drags out almost every scene a bit too long and has a wandering camera that tends to focus on the nearest electronic appliance (clock, boom box, television, phone) whenever one appears within a ten-foot radius. There's a nifty conceit in Jonathan's constructing his "homemade Ouija boards," as a fearful, standard-issue medium warns him, but his meddling soon gives way to do-gooderism. In a true New Age-y kind of way, it's not enough that Jonathan is, to quote another B movie, causing a rift in death's design, he also has to be mending, too and making the world a better place. Thus, Jonathan goes from grieving husband to parapsychology explorer to vigilante ghost hunter, and "I hear dead people" turns into "I hear dead people – and have to save them! Now!"

Anchoring all this Sixth Sense meets The Ring gravitas is Keaton, who permanently wears an expression throughout the movie that says "This is totally fucked up" even as his character starts believing in all the techno-hokum his TV screen is spitting out. (On a sartorial note, Keaton also never met a sweater or turtleneck he didn't like, and half his seriousness seems wrapped up in making sure he shows off his cashmere duds to their full effect.) Once, however, the third act of the plot reveals itself, White Noise falls into a standard thriller mode, albeit one peppered with innumerable promotions of electronic gadgets and trendy Vancouver architecture. Soon, its attempt at avoiding exploitation is undercut by the need to deliver big, obvious scares at any given moment, a la the more recent (and more effective) The Grudge. Unfortunately, a close-up of a ringing cell phone is not quite as scary as a close-up of a ghostly, screaming Japanese child. And without a filmmaker willing to jazz things up a bit, static is just… static.