The Signal — SF, 3rd string, original
An odd film. A trio of hyper-bright MIT students are on a road trip to California to deliver 1 of them (the cute one, Olivia Cooke) to a year's fellowship at Caltech, but the other 2 (the dorky one, Beau Knapp, and the rugged, athletic-looking guy with the crutches, Brenton Thwaites) want to take a little side excursion to a spot in rural Nevada which seems to be the point of origin of a mysterious computer signal that trashed their computer servers back in Cambridge and which has been heckling them about it ever since.
They drive down a rutted dirt road to find what appears to be a deserted shack, and they figure it must just be a relay point for a hidden operative located elsewhere, but the lads go poking around inside it anyway, when they hear screams coming from outside. They rush back out just in time to see the gal suddenly levitated, then everything goes black. When they wake up, they're flat on their backs in separate rooms, wearing hospital gowns, in a strange, all-white underground lab, surrounded by mysterious people in hazmat suits, only one of whom (Laurence Fishburne as Damon) ever talks to them, often from behind a 1-way mirror.
What's up? They spend the rest of the movie trying to (a) find out and (b) get out.
It's a puzzlebox of a movie. It didn't need much of a budget, but it's well scripted (by William Eubank, Carlyle Eubank, and David Frigerio), aside from repeated obscure flashbacks by Nic (the viewpoint character), his legs all muscular, running thru the woods, pausing beside a rushing stream, and riding on a carnival tilt-a-whirl. We keep waiting for these scenes to contribute some explanatory power to the situation, but they never do, so in the end they're just a distracting annoyance.
There are few other characters, and — aside from the central 3 — they're all strangely "off" somehow. The actors sell them well. The plot keeps your attention all the way thru. It's an original. All of these are plusses. The main downsides are the credibility gaps, but if you go into it without conventional expectations, you'll probably be able to slide past them.
An odd film. A trio of hyper-bright MIT students are on a road trip to California to deliver 1 of them (the cute one, Olivia Cooke) to a year's fellowship at Caltech, but the other 2 (the dorky one, Beau Knapp, and the rugged, athletic-looking guy with the crutches, Brenton Thwaites) want to take a little side excursion to a spot in rural Nevada which seems to be the point of origin of a mysterious computer signal that trashed their computer servers back in Cambridge and which has been heckling them about it ever since.
They drive down a rutted dirt road to find what appears to be a deserted shack, and they figure it must just be a relay point for a hidden operative located elsewhere, but the lads go poking around inside it anyway, when they hear screams coming from outside. They rush back out just in time to see the gal suddenly levitated, then everything goes black. When they wake up, they're flat on their backs in separate rooms, wearing hospital gowns, in a strange, all-white underground lab, surrounded by mysterious people in hazmat suits, only one of whom (Laurence Fishburne as Damon) ever talks to them, often from behind a 1-way mirror.
What's up? They spend the rest of the movie trying to (a) find out and (b) get out.
It's a puzzlebox of a movie. It didn't need much of a budget, but it's well scripted (by William Eubank, Carlyle Eubank, and David Frigerio), aside from repeated obscure flashbacks by Nic (the viewpoint character), his legs all muscular, running thru the woods, pausing beside a rushing stream, and riding on a carnival tilt-a-whirl. We keep waiting for these scenes to contribute some explanatory power to the situation, but they never do, so in the end they're just a distracting annoyance.
There are few other characters, and — aside from the central 3 — they're all strangely "off" somehow. The actors sell them well. The plot keeps your attention all the way thru. It's an original. All of these are plusses. The main downsides are the credibility gaps, but if you go into it without conventional expectations, you'll probably be able to slide past them.