In the techie ghost yarn "White Noise," Michael Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, an architect whose perfect preoccupation is disrupted when his better half, Anna (Chandra West), a "bestselling writer" of "universal renown" and preternatural hotness, disappears. Even so, should any actual bestselling writers of cosmopolitan celebrity encounter to go off at a tangent into the audience during the movie's early scenes by mistake, they clout be dismayed at the sight of Anna swanning around the master retainers of her suburban McMansion in a lacy lilac half-slip girlishly clutching a express pregnancy trial to her bosom. Anyway, such is their love and reliance on state-of-the-wiliness communication equipment that soon after her extirpation, Anna starts exasperating to touch build with her manage from beyond the grave. Previous that happens, on the other hand, numero uno Geoffrey Sax and screenwriter Niall Johnson treat us to the full limit of their up-market connubial bliss, presumably on the assumption that their deluge of contentment transfer fix Jonathan's loss feel that much sadder.

Fat chance. "Stainless Noise" begins as an overlit paean to trophy-wifedom and "lifestyle" living, then essentially gets down on its knees and begs to be called "a stylish thriller." The movie straitjackets Keaton into a humorless, table-pounding part, preferring to let go his real landed estate holdings, art chrestomathy and quietly expensive clothes do the talking. Previous to Anna's disappearance, the ancestors inhabited a cosmos of such meretricious perfection one could be forgiven for ratiocinative Sax actually wants the audience to care them ill — which would have been a go beyond a thus far more exciting gambit than the a specific he indeed goes for. In the place of recognizable humans, we get Anna, the kind of correspondent whose milky mug commands a full-bellman author photo on the remote jacket of her new book; Jonathan, the kind of architect who walks very stable through his epically up on "raw" office room; and Mike (Nicholas Elia), the son, shunted between his mother Jane's (Sarah Strange) house and his father's cul-de-sac fantasy win (which not for nothing has white lilies embossed on the plate glass door), whose life seems to consist entirely of being cute, perspicacious and placidly undemanding. The Riverses plainly "include it all" — except, notably, decent soiree — if "having it all" means living as nevertheless life were the joint marketing venture of Intentions Within Reach, the Sharper Image and a consortium of Beverly Hills flexible surgeons. All this, and they want sympathy too?

Into this imagineered idyll bursts an unwelcome and frankly startling (considering the eerily indefectible surroundings) imperfection: the sick-making crackle of motionless. Representing all of their advanced gadgetry, the Riverses enthral have at least two Stone Age implements — a kitchen profitability-box and an old-fashioned answering machine. From the movie's outset moments, the machines snap and buzz with impending wickedness and migraine, starting fixed mildly and becoming increasingly demonic as Jonathan refashions himself into a 21st century ghost-buster. The static, as it turns out, is not cellphone tower interference but "messages from the other side," a notion Jonathan is at the start introduced to by Raymond Assess (Ian McNeice), a lurking fat man who claims Anna has been difficult to communicate with him.

As Raymond explains it, he is not a instrumentality or a sibyl; he's merely a recorder of EVP (electronic chance phenomena), a TiVo of the insipid, as it were. In other words, all that phone immobile may be caused not by brisk jolts of pollute electricity but by spectral broadcasts from the beyond.

At maiden, Jonathan dismisses him as a eccentric, but after a cellphone, a lamplight bulb and an elevator collude to freak him out, he moves into a loft and high-tails it to Raymond's place. But it's hurtful news for Jonathan, who, obsessed with recording and remixing messages from his dead wife, which sound mould a bad connection with Linda Blair, slowly evolves from a skeptical specialist type into a sort of DJ Spooky Spook.

Eager to balance the fear intermediary with systematic credibility, "White Noise" begins on a pedagogical note, quoting Einstein and Edison, and ends on a postscript that says that a man in 12 documented cases of EVP are "overtly threatening." This is a double, considering that otherwise Keaton might have spent the bulk of the talkie cuddled up with a 19-inch Sony plainly screen. At Raymond's, Jonathan meets a bookstore owner named Sarah (Deborah Kara Unger), who has also loved, lost and communicated with the dead. Unger's imported looks and unperturbable mien would make her a talent for this compassionate of story, if no greater than she had anything more stimulating to do than play the allocate-your-pain blond sidekick. A more rousing, if silly, acquaintance is made when, also at Raymond's, Jonathan meets a trio of slim, tall, bald and extremely annoyed spectral figures (imagine the Blue Homo sapiens Guild in hell) who start with threats and soon move on to bigger things. "We have some very polluted people dated there" who "like the price," Raymond explains. These Three Enemigos of "Innocent Noise" are well beyond not nice, though, and in their zeal for evil they wind up altering the fundamental proposition of the large screen until it morphs into something else altogether.

Regard for warnings from a blind medium who accuses Jonathan of "meddling" in things he doesn't be in sympathy with (he's not the no greater than one — "White Noise" is a muck up c dirty of red herring), Jonathan eventually combines forces with Sarah to form a Scooby-Doo-style people-help team. Thanks to Anna's spectral APBs, Jonathan is accomplished to rush to the subvention of women in peril as the movie's loose threads oscillation in his wake, and the auditory jolts harbour coming aright up until the illogical, tacked-on, super-fit to be tied expiration. With its haunted television sets, waltzing cameras and preference digs, "White Noise" suggests nothing so much as a soulless remake of "Poltergeist," ("Yuppiegeist"?), albeit one that wouldn't really be scary at all with the sound turned off. Perhaps the scariest things about it are how impecunious it tries to be cold-blooded and how fundamentally it equates cool with possessing the right obstruct.

'White Noise'


MPAA rating:

PG-13 for violence, disturbing images and vocabulary

Times guidelines:

Standard horrifying movie shocks, plus one scene of off-putting violence

Michael Keaton

…Jonathan Rivers

Chandra West

…Anna Rivers

Deborah Kara Unger

…Sarah Tate

Ian McNeice

…Raymond Guerdon

Sarah Strange

…Jane
Universal Studios and Gold Circle Films show a White Clap UK and Brightlight Pictures performance, in cooperative with Endgame Entertainment, released by All-inclusive Studios. Director Geoffrey Sax. Producer Shawn Williamson, Paul Brooks. Managerial producers Norm Waitt, Scott Niemeyer, Stephen Hegyes, Simon Brooks. Screenplay by Niall Johnson. Cinematographer Chris Seager. Editor Nick Arthurs. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.
In general release.