"The Signal" Review

I've been struggling. I saw "The Signal" more than a week ago, and (as my friends have continually noted) should have written this by now. Part of it is procrastination, but in order to avoid looking like a total jerk, I blame half on my inability to sum up my feelings. However, if I remove the grandeur, I'm going to end up at this statement: "The Signal" entertains, mixing surreal visuals with edge-of-your-seat tension to craft a dreamlike experience.

I was transported to a dream. The world presented on screen looked like my world: same people, same buildings, same trees and rivers. However, these people moved slower, the trees too aligned, the river a bit too raucous. The film's beginning is effective as a commercial for desert tourism, but I always felt a general sense of discomfort, logical and emotional.

Nic (Brenton Thwaites), Haley (Olivia Cooke), and Jonah (Beau Knapp) drive through the desert on their way to Haley's new California home. However, the hacker NOMAD follows: a thorn in their side. NOMAD has been taunting and pursuing the trio's attention since hacking into their M.I.T. servers: a constant presence in the back of their minds, simply asking "r u agitated?". The more they (and the movie) try to ignore it, the more it pushes, hacking into security cameras, email accounts, personal laptops. Like a monster in a nightmare, NOMAD is unavoidable, eventually getting the best of our hero's curiosities.

Before we know it, the movie thrusts us in the thick of the nightmare; the search for NOMAD leads to an abandoned shack, a sudden flash of light, and a blank white room. Lawrence Fishburne sits in a containment suit: a scientist scribbling notes on Nic's confused and terrified reactions. His demands for clarity are countered by deafening silence, off-hand questions about Nic's temperament, or requests to solve simple puzzles. No answers are to be found from the other scientists who don't acknowledge his presence, or in the blank medical records, or on the clock that doesn't look broken, but rather as if it never ticked at all. The movie then follows Nic as he tries to escape and find out who kidnapped him, why, where his friends are, and what it all means.

When I was a kid watching "The Twilight Zone", I wasn't always entertained. I wasn't always happy about the outcome. But I always was stuck in my seat. In the same way, "The Signal" is uncomfortable, but I'm looking to uncover the answers. There's an idea about what's happening, but the details evolve. I discover different pieces of information, and not all of them click, but they're not supposed to. The movie puts us in Nic's shoes, attempting to sift through all sources of information to find the truth. The environment is sparse, constricting; Nic is a rat in a maze trying to break the system.

With every development, my eyebrow raised. With every fallacy, I shook my head in disbelief, but I kept watching, enthralled by what the outcome could be. Does "The Signal" have the most original ending? No. Has the idea been done before? Yes. But in the age of extinction, I'm happy to see a story comfortable enough to ignore bombast and let the merits of the story speak for itself. Often times, those are the kinds of stories people remember. I'll fondly remember "The Twilight Zone", and something tells me I'll fondly remember "The Signal."

Thank you for reading; I'm the Man Without A Plan, signing off.

                                                                                  "The Signal" Review: