Weak signal

REVIEWED: WHITE NOISE

What is that indistinct keening noise? Who is trying to contact us from that country beyond whose bourne no traveller returns? Why, it's Michael Keaton. "Let me be a proper film star again," he pleads. "My next movie is Herbie: Fully Loaded. I was Batman once, you know." You're very faint, Michael. We're losing you.

White Noise, a boring amalgam of The Sixth Sense and The Ring, which opened last week without a press preview, is unlikely to rescue Keaton's career. Beginning and ending with a bunch of pseudo-scientific baloney about something called Electric Voice Phenomenon, the film suggests, with worrying seriousness, that the dead may be talking to us through our radios, televisions and computers. With the assistance of a portly English eccentric (Ian McNeice) and a scarily vacant bookseller (Deborah Kara Unger), Keaton sets out to contact his recently deceased wife. But, sometime after the audience has stopped caring, it dawns on him that he is receiving messages transmitted before his various correspondents have actually passed on. Weird. Spooky. Stupid.

What follows is, insofar as I could understand it, variously incoherent and preposterous. In the film-makers' defence, they resist the temptation to suggest that the hero has been dead all along.