I’ve been on a horror/zombie roll of late… And I get lucky again this week with The Signal. This time out, though, we’re not dealing with zombies per se. No, this one is a variant on the 28 Days / I Am Legend notion of a globalized infection which makes people go homicidally mad… kind of a like a goofy (if still dangerous) version of the Reavers in Serenity. They’re not the Slow-moving Undead at all. They’re quick-footed, and quick-fisted. And they use tools and such to kill—not to satisfy cannibalistic hunger, but out of some imputed paranoia.

And the source of the infection is not some pathogen, it’s your TV.

Scary.

The other twist here is that the film tells a single story in three segments, each helmed by a different director—focusing on a different character in the story, and in a slightly different tone or style.

Ostensibly, the aim of the film was to tell the same story from three different rigorous points of view… But that doesn’t really happen. In each segment, we are shown details that each of the three characters couldn’t possibly have known; so point-of-view becomes just another of the film’s mounting casualty list. And while there are indeed “rewind” points—just as in this week’s Vantage Point and Sidney Lumet’s recent old-dogs-try-out-new-tricks-and-fail foray Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead—those moments are really fairly incidental. Once the narrative skips to the next character, the story moves forward in a relatively linear fashion.

The biggest problem with the film, though, is not its failure to live up to its self-generated (and budget-constrained) hype (particularly since hype of any kind is rarely relevant). What drags the film down the most is its uneven tone.

The first segment—which focuses on Mya, a young woman who is cheating on her husband and longs to escape from the city of Terminus to start a new life—is the most conventionally pleasing of the three. It’s taut, efficient, and character-driven. As Mya, Anessa Ramsey has a compelling presence, and the segment absorbs the gravitas of her character. It’s also got one of the best lines in the film, as Mya’s lover Ben intones, “The TV turned itself on.” Oh, yeah. Doesn’t it, though?

The second segment moves on to follow the paranoid fantasies of Mya’s husband Lewis; and since he’s the most seriously “infected” of our three protagonists, this section of the film is the most loopy. It feels at times as though we’ve slipped into a Mel Brooks horror send-up, and the point-of-view structure is at its most fractured. Lewis decides to abscond with Ben’s pest-control equipment—and after No Country For Old Men, he comes off as a weak parody of Anton Chigurh (though, of course, that could hardly have been intended). The best the dialogue the film can muster in this segment is Lewis’ observation that one of his unfortunate victims “had it coming… probably.” One has to wonder at this point whether the filmmakers figure we do, too.

It’s almost a relief when the third segment begins, picking up Ben’s story as he searches for Mya, following the trail of wreckage that Lewis has left. Here, the tone takes on Justin Welborn’s intensity. His Ben is the strongest male presence in the film, and he truly manages to embody what may be the film’s most pointed social commentary: “If we change the way we look at things, the things we look at will change.” And co-director Dan Bush, who drew the shortest straw, manages to restore the suspense of the opening segment while wrapping things up with a style that might remind you a bit of There Will Be Blood—which Paul Thomas Anderson has also described as a horror film.

The film is by no means a failure; it simply betrays its guerrilla origins and low budget, and works pretty well if you think of it as an experimental film. Just don’t expect it to be the greatest thing since sliced zombie brains, and remember… there will indeed be blood.

According to IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, The Signal is rated R… But the official MPAA site lists neither a rating nor rating reasons for The Signal. What up widdat? In any event, this is very clearly R material… and yet not the most salacious of stuff in the way of horror. No torture-porn here—just the usual excess of tinted Karo syrup.

Courtesy of a local publicist, Greg attended a press screening of The Signal.