Movie review: White Noise

From left Greta Gerwig (Babette), May Nivola (Steffie), Adam Driver (Jack), Samuel Nivola (Heinrich) and Raffey Cassidy (Denise). Photo / Netflix

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.

Director Noah Baumbach (Marriage Story, The Squid and the Whale) gives it the old college try and for the most part succeeds. Some sections fall flat, understandable as it tackles so many 80s tropes, but when it sizzles it’s jam hot.

Actor Adam Driver reunites with Baumbach to star as Jack, a renowned professor of Hitler studies. He’s madly in love with his third wife, Babette, played by Greta Gerwig, who is combatting her fear of death by secretly popping an experimental drug to make her chill out. However, it also makes her forgetful and the kids in their blended family begin to worry about her. Their investigation into her secretive behaviour is interrupted by part two, titled The Airborn Toxic Event, in which their town is locked down and then evacuated and has more than a whiff of our recent pandemic about it. And finally, it moves into its third part, which takes a twist into revenge thriller territory.

As said, it’s a wild ride and one you need to strap in for. It won’t be for everyone, but if you can see past the noise, it’s a wonderfully unashamedly weird picture.

3 Stars

Cast: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig, Don Cheadle

Director: Noah Baumbach

Running time: 135 minutes

Rating: M, (Adult themes)

Verdict: A wonderfully weird whiplash of a movie.