The Signal (2007)

October Challenge – Day 6

For tonight’s movie I’m hitting another independent movie, this time “The Signal” from 2007. This is an everyone-goes-psycho movie, but presented in an interesting fashion through three segments from three different characters perspectives and set in the fictional city of “Terminus” on what appears to be New Years Eve. Each section (or “Transmission” as the film refers to it) has it’s own director and with that it’s own style. David Bruckner (V//H//S, The Night House) directs the first section “Crazy in Love”, Jacob Gentry (Synchronicity) directs the second “The Jealousy Monster” and Dan Bush (The Vault) directs the final piece “Escape from Terminus”.

We interrupt this transmission to make you batshit insane.

After a brief swerve of 70’s style horror (that was just on TV) we start with the trigger for everyone going nuts, which is a signal breaking through to peoples TV sets and radios. Coming across like some garbled interference but it was pretty clear what it was going to do. The film wastes no time starting up and doesn’t get bogged down in explaining the why’s of the situation. Things are kept vague enough that you can bet there are a lot of theories on this one. That works for me.

The intro sets up the two key characters Mya (Anessa Ramsey) and Ben (Justin Welborn) who are a pair of lovers that are considering eloping. Mya is married to Lewis (AJ Bowen) and the marriage is clearly not happy, though since we don’t get to to see them together pre-signal we don’t get to find out why.

Crazy in Love

The first section “Crazy in Love” follows Mya’s journey. After leaving Ben’s place she comes across a man (possibly homeless) asking for help and covered in blood. The man claims to have been attacked. Another man starts approaching them menacingly and so Mya get’s in her car and drives off. She returns to her own apartment building to find people the hallway fighting and acting generally crazy. Disturbed she quickly heads to her apartment.

As she enters, her husband and two of his friends are trying to watch the big game, but because the TV is getting the crazy signal they are mostly standing around being angry. Lewis obviously suspects Mya of her affair and questions her with an accusation tone. I can’t really judge if Lewis is a bad person normally since Mya is having an affair and Lewis has been affected by the crazy signal, but here he is aggressive and domineering.

That Escalated Quickly!

One of his friends is waving around his baseball bat and out of nowhere Lewis starts to get mad about it, after the argument gets heated he ends up bludgeoning his friend to death. As the other friend wrestles with Ben, Mya flees only to come across another murder in the hallway. This leads to a series of violent attacks and fleeing that eventually sees Mya crash a car and shout at some guy that offers help to stay away and she’s going to terminal 13 to meet her boyfriend and get out of Terminus and don’t follow her. That leads into our second segment which switches gears.

The Jealousy Monster

Transmission two: “The Jealousy Monster” is probably the most fun section of the movie, changing into a black comedy horror, but maintaining the brutality so it doesn’t feel like a section from a different film. This follows a character named Clark (Played by Scott Poythress), the good Samaritan that Mya refused to let help him. He is sheltering around a neighbours house, a woman called Anna who was going to host a New Years Eve party.

Both of them have managed to kill someone in self defence and it remains questionable if either of them are affected by the transmission. Into this mix comes Lewis (Mya’s husband), looking for Mya and clearly with a very loose grip on reality. The trio tries to keep their sense of reality but for Lewis and Anna this seems to be a losing battle. Anna is mostly harmless, Mya’s jealous and possessive husband though, much less so

Escape From Terminus

The Final section: “Escape from Terminus” finally follows Ben’s journey. I don’t want to give away too many details here as it is the final section but suffice to say it involves him having a stand off with Lewis and finally discovering Mya’s fate.

There was a lot of positives to this movie. The three directors different styles and the change in pacing and character focus kept things feeling fresh for the duration. The actors all did their job well and I quite liked the score. The plot is pretty straight forward but it didn’t really need to be more complicated and it contains in it the big mystery of why this is happening. Is the signal an attack? Is Terminus purgatory or hell? None of this gets answered, but ambiguity and mystery isn’t a bad thing for this kind of horror.

Confusion, Mysteries, Balance and Madness.

That said, they probably should have examined the situation a little more that they did. The movie reminds me a bit of Pontypool, which came out a year after this in 2008, but Pontypool actually did dig into the mystery of what was happening a little more and they did it so well the movie became a real classic. They didn’t need to dig in much here, just enough to give the mystery a bit more meat, but they opted not to. It’s not a big issue, but I think if done right it could have added to the overall mystery.

The film has a good balance between the brutality, character moments and comedy. The later is used sparingly and mostly in the middle section, but seeps out a little bit after through one of the characters from that section and it’s just enough to make the transition smooth. The brutality is fast and effective and just graphic enough for it to feel brutal without just trying to gross you out. It’s also spaced out enough that nothing is wasted. They do a good job of blurring the line between those that have gone psycho due to the signal and those pushed to their limit psychologically by the world around them.

Conclusion

On the whole I’ve got to say I liked this movie. It’s the second movie close to opening up my 7/10 spot for films this year (Hatching being the first). It’s worth mentioning (If you haven’t figured it out already) I rarely give 7 stars or higher. The decision factor for that is basically “Do I like this enough to buy the physical media”, Signal isn’t quite there but I definitely recommend giving it a watch.

UPDATE: Having the benefit of a few extra days to reflect and a few more movies to compare it to, I have decided, this is actually one I want to own. So I’m bumping it up to a 7/10. It does absolutely deserve it. Now it’s up to the other films this month to try and reach towards an 8.