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BROADCAST SIGNAL INTRUSION
Director: Jacob Gentry Cast: Harry Shum Jr., Kelley Mack, Chris Sullivan, Michael B. Woods, Arif Yampoisky, Richard Cotovsky, Steve Pringle, Justin Welborn, Jennifer Jelsema MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:44 Release Date: 10/22/21 (limited; digital & on-demand) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 21, 2021 A clever idea, loosely based on real-life incidents, isn't enough to carry Broadcast Signal Intrusion. Like its protagonist, Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall's screenplay (expanded from the pair's earlier short) becomes far too caught up in the density of the central mystery. By the end, we have a general idea about what the filmmakers are trying to say and an even vaguer notion of what did or didn't happen. The story follows James (Harry Shum Jr.), a video archivist for a local TV station in Chicago, circa 1999. Upon discovering a mysterious and creepy instance of signal hijacking (in which an outsider illegally interrupts a broadcast with some other content), James becomes obsessed, trying to determine who intruded on the broadcast, as well as two other ones, and what message they were trying to send. James falls deeper and deeper into investigating these incidents. The FCC and FBI reached a dead end years ago, although they keep tabs on anyone looking into the hijackings. All of this is, obviously, not just about a person in an eerie mask or the strange, static-based soundtrack of these interruptions. James has a tragic secret, involving a wife who's no longer with him. Eventually, Alice (Kelley Mack), who has been quietly stalking James, gets in on the search, too. There's a lot of staring at screens, either on televisions or computer monitors (This is back in the day of rudimentary online chat groups, so it's not particularly exciting), in order to offer more and more hints and details. Director Jacob Gentry creates a broad sense of paranoia and threat, with a sense that someone is always watching James and that all of his leads might have some hidden agenda. That's all the screenplay really provides, though, in the forms of a lot of sinister clues, involving the possibility that the intrusions were distracting from or confessing to the disappearances of women, and encounters with unreliable and/or unhinged suspects. It's a constant drip of exposition and back story, which is intentionally imprecise, since the ambiguity of what James does or doesn't find here becomes the bigger point of Broadcast Signal Intrusion. That point, of course, has to do with grief or, more specifically, the transference of it, but the movie's own descent into the rabbit hole of this mystery ends up distracting from that theme, instead of elucidating it. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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