Review: BROADCAST SIGNAL INSTRUSION

There's so much that this one got right ... in the writers' room. A mystery from the early web that draws on real phenomena and a neo noir murder path with a young hotshot widower on the case. Sound good? Need more detail? Ok: it's 1999 and young James moonlights in the archives of a local Chicago tv station putting the backroom mess in order. It's boring but one of them has a glitch. It's as though another program is tearing its way into the recorded one. I say program but really it's a couple of people or mannequins in a low lit room with a murmuring voice that seems to be trying to say something. Then - flash! - it's back to normal. Don't people ever check these things? Looking into it he finds that there have been others, going back decades and each one follows the disappearance of a woman. One of the women was his wife. He's on the trail.

He's already pretty well connected online as a hotshot gamer and in the era when snopes was a newsgroup moderator, sorting law from lore for real. Soon, he's meeting digital sages, freaky phreakers, and his very own stalker who joins him in the hunt which gets darker the closer he gets to paydirt. So far, so intriguing. So, why didn't I care at all about any of this?

I'ts not in the subject matter. Broadcast signal instrusions did happen and the weirder of them are easily found on YouTube (start with Max Headroom hijacking or just search on the general term) and they are intriguing; someone with a well above average technical skill breaks into normal programming with content so odd it's unsettling, as though you are witnessing the workings of a deranged mind's daydreams. 

The other major influence on this which drove the look and feel of the instrusions in the movie is the I Feel Fantastic videos. These are searchable on that string and show dressed mechanical dolls who move slightly and "sing" in what sounds like a synthesised voice. This is in an otherwise normal looking room in a house. A sizeable portion of the video is taken by static shots of woodlands. This doesn't mean anything until a YouTube channel provides an "In Search of" style commentary imposing a template of creepy suggestions of what the video is showing. Is it, for example, showing a murderer's lair where he makes automatons who are dressed in the clothes of his victims and sing weirdly through the night. And is the exterior in the woods the surrounds of his house for the adventurous to discover? Probably not, but it sends a tingle down the spine when you see it first.

The trouble starts when you recognise the elements and know the real thing was creepier than this fiction, that it, as a kind of participatory fiction, has been accessible for decades and needs no embelishment. As one of the comments on one of the iterations of the video puts it: 2009 - this is so scary. turn it off. 2022 - guys leave her alone, she's just vibing. See also the Max Headroom intrusion which still intrigues but is better left the enigma it remains. Surgically attaching a neo noir murder plot to it just feels too late.

The trouble continues when you see that the lead has no charisma and very little emotive power beyond expressing slight annoyance at his circumstances. None of the situations he finds himself in feel as dangerous as they are depicted. The shady figures who provide pieces of the puzzle in alleyways and darkened hotel rooms feel too contrived in a film later than about 1985. The intrusions themselves are well executed but they really had such a short way to go to get slotted into the timeline of a movie like this. In fact, if this film has a central sin it is not that it's try hard but needs to try harder. The very last sequence provides more genuine chills and mystery than the entirety of the rest of the film. If it had been the opening sequence perhaps the writers might have really put some thought into how to live up to it.