A video archivist becomes obsessed with the idea that a series of TV
broadcast hacks are connected with his wife's disappearance.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Jacob Gentry
Starring: Harry Shum Jr., Kelley Mack, Justin Welborn, Michael
B. Woods, Jennifer Jelsema
Director Jacob Gentry's conspiracy (or is it?) thriller
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is set in 1999 and takes us
back to that brief era of paranoia and uncertainty in the years leading
up to the dawn of the new millennium. Remember the panic over the
millennium bug, with lots of smart people telling us that technology
would shit the bed because computers didn't understand how to adjust
their in-built clocks? There was a sense that even if the world didn't
end, the new millennium would bring an era of darkness, an idea
exploited by numerous serial killer movies and the aptly named
X-Files spin-off Millennium.
That uncertain era is where we find our hero, James (Harry Shum Jr). Three years after the mysterious disappearance of his wife, James
works nights alone in a basement archiving old TV broadcasts onto discs
for posterity. One night while copying a broadcast from TV he's shocked
to come across a rare "Broadcast Signal Intrusion" – a 1987 edition of a
chat show is interrupted by hackers who screen some brief but unsettling
images of what appears to be a woman wearing a white mask while odd
tones play on the soundtrack.
James becomes obsessed with this discovery, and research leads him to
find that there was a similar hack that same year. A meeting with a
professor who warns him to give up his investigation for his physical
safety only encourages James to go further down the rabbit hole. He
becomes aware of a third hack, broadcast the night after his wife
disappeared. When he learns that the two previous hacks also followed
still unsolved disappearances of women, James becomes convinced that
they have a connection to his wife's unexplained vanishing. With the aid
of Alice (Kelley Mack), a streetwise young woman, he sets out to
find the people responsible.
Visually, Broadcast Signal Intrusion does a wonderful job
of capturing the look of late '90s thrillers. With its shadowy basements
and ineffectual lamps, it has the look of some lost David Fincher movie
from 1999. Ben Lovett's trumpet-heavy score adds greatly to the
noir ambience as Gentry mines tension from our protagonist's ignorance
of just what he's gotten himself into. There's a scene in a basement
involving an unexplained noise from upstairs that is positively
skin-crawling, and it's reflective of how much terror Gentry manages to
wring out of ambiguity.
Broadcast Signal Intrusion might be dismissed as overly
nostalgic, but it's knowingly so and it uses our familiarity with the
tropes of conspiracy thrillers to keep us on edge. As such, every
interaction James has with another character causes us to question their
motivations. Eventually we begin to wonder if maybe we're being overly
paranoid, that perhaps we've seen too many movies like
Broadcast Signal Intrusion. Perhaps James has seen too many movies like this and is making a big
deal out of what could well be no more than a prank played by some
over-educated tech geek with time on their hands.
Thanks to endearing performances from Shum Jr and Mack, exploring this
shadowy world with James and Alice is as fun as it is nerve-wracking.
They have the playful repartee of the hero and heroine of an early
British Hitchcock thriller. At one point Alice queries James about his
hobbies, and after much pondering he's forced to admit that he
essentially has no life of his own. His adventure with Alice down the
rabbit… (wait a minute, I see what you did there movie!) hole is just
what he needs to shake him out of his rut, even if it leads to a dead
end or to his own demise.
Unfortunately, after keeping us gripped for 80 minutes, Broadcast Signal Intrusion
sputters to an unsatisfying conclusion that may well sour a lot of
viewers on the overall movie. Even if it ultimately leads nowhere of
note, Broadcast Signal Intrusion
is a mystery worth investigating for fans of conspiracy
thrillers.
