If you stare at white noise long enough, you can sometimes see images and shapes form in the flickering static. Much the same as those 3D picture books that were inexplicably popular in the 90s.
Netflix’s new movie White Noise is a little like that. As soon as you start to think you can see what’s going on the movie flickers into something else entirely.
It can be jarring and disconcerting to judder from a wordy workplace comedy to a jumpscare horror, or from an unsettling but all too familiar, pandemic-esque satire into an elongated chase sequence of vehicle-based humour that’s right out of National Lampoon’s Vacation.
But somehow, it all works. Mainly because the film’s sudden gear shifts are never less than entertaining. Sometimes wildly so. It’s like riding the dodgems at the Easter Show and being blindsided by a wily driver. You might feel the whiplash and confusion of being bumped sideways but it’s still a lot of fun.
Based on Don DeLillo’s 1980s famed postmodern novel of the same name, White Noise was largely regarded as “unfilmable”. And watching this it’s easy to see why. Each of its three sections is almost standalone, with only the barest thread connecting them, and its themes of existential dread, rampant consumerism, fidelity, pharmaceutical dependence and era-specific social commentary and satire is a heck of a lot to cram into one movie.
