The Signal

(2007)***

Upon waking up in her boyfriend’s apartment, Mya begins to panic when she realizes that she overslept and was expected home hours earlier. Mya is cheating on her husband, you see. Meanwhile her boyfriend, Ben, is fiddling with his television, which is sending out an odd scrambled signal. Attempts to reach her husband by phone fail when Mya finds that her cell phone only produces a loud, piercing sound. After Ben makes a pathetic plea to convince Mya to stay, the two hatch a plan to meet at a specific subway terminal in order to run off together once and for all.

Mya suspects that all is not right

While walking through Ben’s parking garage Mya notices that the people around her are behaving oddly, almost agitated. Arriving home she finds the people in her apartment complex behaving similarly, some speaking gibberish and others shouting. Mindful of her tardiness she shakes off what she’s seen and enters her apartment where she finds her husband and two friends struggling to fix the television, which is also projecting the same weird signal. Initially her husband, Lewis, grills her on her late arrival, however Mya ultimately convinces him that she was out with girlfriends at a bar. Desperately wanting to believe her obvious lie he lets it slide. Returning to his friends who are still trying to fix the television, Lewis begins to act weird, paranoid, and eventually violent, like really violent. As Mya flees she finds that everyone is acting crazy, and worse, trying to kill her.

Mya's instincts were correct, all is definitely not right

With echoes of Stephen King’s novel The Cell and a sprinkle of 28 Days Later, The Signal is 5 a star horror movie for 30 minutes. It’s fast-paced, violent, and, yes, scary. Because it’s not immediately obvious that the entire world has changed in an instant, the viewer feels ill at ease - things look the same, but there’s definitely something weird going on. This sea change in society occurs the moment adulteress Mya travels home to her husband following her evening of debauchery. Mya’s growing awareness that things aren’t quite right plays out perfectly with increasing tension culminating with an unexpected eruption of violence. Mya’s escape from her apartment will remind you of the beginning of the Dawn of the Dead remake.

Then The Signal starts to go into suck mode. It took a few minutes but I started to realize that I was no longer enjoying the film. The creepy tone was no longer there and the story began to verge on becoming a slapstick comedy. It was almost as if the director was attempting to create his own Shaun of the Dead. “What the hell?” I asked myself. How could such a terrific setup be ruined so quickly? The final third of the film recovers some of the tone from the beginning, but not enough to save the story.

Don't look at it too long!

After a little research, real little, I learned that The Signal’s 3 segments were each directed by different people, which explains the film’s unevenness in tone. It’s a shame that first segment director, David Bruckner, didn’t direct the entire enchilada. The Signal starts out with terrific promise, but like most things in life, it eventually settles into mediocrity.