The Signal is the first great cult hit of 2008. While unquestionably not a film for everyone, it is an important treatise on the dark side of technology and will doubtless be discussed in media and cinema studies classes for years to come. While films generally heralded by academia do not normally find wide audience appeal, the perversely funny, consistently spooky and pornographically violent The Signal is almost guaranteed an enthusiastic, if disproportionally diminutive, following.
The structure of the film is divided into three parts. It opens like 28 Days Later, morphs into Shawn of the Dead, and slams into the finish line like a deleted scene from Fight Club. (The Signal had three directors, none of whom communicated their artist intentions to the others during the duration of the film’s production.)
The Signal begins with promise and possibility. Two lovers make plans to run away together, to escape their dull lives (and her abusive husband) and start anew elsewhere. But their dreams, pregnant with optimism for the future, are torn apart when the city’s televisions (everyone in this film seems to have sprung for the largest HD flatscreen out there) begin broadcasting a hypnotic signal that causes large segments of the population to descend into a sort of mass psychosis leading to irrepressible aggressiveness and primordial paranoia.
Soon one cannot tell the affected from those merely defending themselves as the city devolves into a slaughterhouse. As our lovers fight to stay alive and get to the train station from which they hope to flee the city, they are hunted by beasts that look and sound like the friends and family members they once knew, but are now driven by an insatiable and inexplicable thirst for violence.
The trailers for The Signal would lead one to believe that the movie is a fairly straightforward horror film. Don’t believe it. The Signal operates on levels at which its marketing doesn’t even hint. Mixing equal parts science fiction, horror, gratuitous bloodletting, Grindhouse aesthetics, and madcap, overblown satire, The Signal is its own, unique cinematic animal. It runs with the absurdity of a drug-induced nightmare, the sort that you know cannot be real but from which you cannot seem to wake.
“He was watching TV and it made him go mad,” explains one character. “It is telling me what I should do…what I should want…it was replacing my thoughts,” bemoans another. The Signal is a nightmare in which TV and technology are quite literally killing us. As a social commentary, The Signal, a guerrilla indie shot entirely in Atlanta, Georgia, is far from subtle. It parodies its ancestors in a manner not unrecognizable to Mel Brooks, skewers its target with the darkly comical eye of Stanley Kubrick, and parades around in Stephen King’s viscera splattered duds. While this mash up admittedly doesn’t appear to work on paper, it creates a fusion unlike anything else on screen — a film not afraid to use the very medium it attacks to both entertain and enlighten.
© Copyright 2008 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.