Review: ‘The Signal’

“The Signal” is a delightfully weird little sci-fi indie movie that has more than one trick up its sleeve, and while the story is lacking an emotional thread that ties all the twists and turns together, it is pretty well made and fun to watch unfold, like a Twilight Zone episode that just goes bonkers.

The story is centered on three college kids, Nic, Jonah and Haley. Nic and Haley are a couple, but their relationship is at a tough spot because not only are they taking a cross country trip from MIT to California to help Haley relocate for school, but Nic also has some sort of physical ailment which is making him lose the use of his legs and most likely other things as well. So he’s scared of what’s going to become of himself and he doesn’t want to be a burden on Haley. Meanwhile, Nic and Jonah are computer whiz kids who are in the midst of a game of a cat and mouse with a hacker named Nomad, and while on their cross country trip to take Haley to California, they find out where this Nomad character lives and decide to take a quick side trip to pay this person a visit.

And then things just go horribly wrong.

Nic wakes up in a hospital setting, wheelchair bound, literally dazed and confused, at which point he finds himself being interrogated by a man in a hazmat suit named Dr. Damon (Laurence Fishburne), and Nic finds himself under observation and asked to complete tasks, all the while he has no recollection of what happened and wants to know where his friends are and where he is and all that good stuff. And from this point forward, the movie becomes a slow yet steady series of reveals, as the layers of this mystery get pulled back until the big final “ta-dah!” of an ending.

And while this is all fun and good, the problem is that there seems to be no real dramatic and emotional line connecting everything. The characters get all emotional with each other and there is a lot of crying but the dramatic weight of the movie adds up to nothing more than “Nic doesn’t know where he is, and he wants to get out.” All the stuff in the beginning about the relationship and their time at MIT, all that character set up, sure it’s nice that we get to know these people just a little bit before they get put through The Shit, but what we know about them and where they were in their lives ultimately has nothing to do with what they end up doing or what is done to them. The story might as well have started with Nic waking up in the hospital because the stuff that came before it was simply set up to get them from point A to point B, as opposed to setting up the characters to have these changing arcs throughout the movie.

And it is kind of a shame that they didn’t give the screenplay and story a couple more passes and find a way to actually make the actions of the movie resonate more, because there is definitely a lot of potential in this film, both in the story and in the style of the movie itself. It actually reminds me a little of “Beyond the Black Rainbow,” another low budget sci-fi flick with some distinctive style and some interesting ideas, but also with a story that ultimately adds up to nothing in kind of a frustrating way. With “The Signal,” it really feels like they came up with the ultimate twist ending first, and then reverse engineered the story to get there, feeling that the “oh shit” moment will be great enough to help out any emotional gaps in the story. But really the ending just hits with the weight of a television episode of some serial, not awe-inspiring like they obviously were going for, as dictated by the music and the way the movie ends right at the big final reveal, as if to send you out the door reeling.

Fun and interesting, if a little unnecessarily overwrought, “The Signal” is a neat movie, though not any sort of instant classic. It might develop a cult following because of the some of the cool effects and ideas, but that’s really it.