THE SIGNAL

DIRECTOR: William Eubank

CAST: Laurence Fishburne, Brenton Thwaites, Beau Knapp and Olivia Cooke

CLASSIFICATION: 7-9 PG VL

RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes

RATING: ***

A GLOSSIER take on the indie trend of brainy, cards-close-to-chest sci-fi pictures that veer towards the mainstream near the end, William Eubank’s The Signal is ultimately a lot less unusual than it appears.

The story of three hackers whose cross-country road trip is interrupted by mysterious forces is captivating for a long stretch though, keeping viewers guessing about the nature of what has happened to these sympathetic youths. The film should secure a generally positive response from genre audiences; art house reception may be less enthusiastic.

Nic and Jonah (Thwaites, Knapp) are MIT students engaged in an online altercation with someone called Nomad, who found his way onto their network and destroyed some servers. Though they’re currently driving Nic’s girlfriend Haley (Cooke) from Cambridge to Caltech, where she is transferring for a year, they get a lead on Nomad’s whereabouts and convince her to take a detour into the desert.

In a scene that plays like a horror film, the three find an abandoned shack with telltale signs of recent habitation. Before they can put clues together though, strange things start to happen. We see Haley pulled up into the air, alien-abduction-style, and everyone loses consciousness. Nic awakes in what seems to be a secret hospital, unable to feel his legs and tended to by silent workers in hazmat suits.

A Dr Wallace Damon (Fishburne) attempts to address his disorientation and anxiety, but is clearly holding things back. He will say, though, that the friends have encountered an EBE (that’s “extraterrestrial biological entity,” for people who think an “ET” isn’t understood to be biological), that it’s very dangerous outside this facility, and that all this secrecy is maintained for a good reason.

Like us, Nic doesn’t buy it, and he’s impatient with being observed in a locked room while Damon rations out information. So he MacGyvers himself some escape strategies and starts moving this film away from less-is-more territory, towards something closer to action mode. Without giving the story’s sometimes confusing surprises away, one can say that the film breaks free of the hospital, with Damon and company chasing Nic, while he struggles to make sense of what he sees and understand why his friends, with whom he reconnects, are behaving like whacked-out shadows of themselves.

There are golden moments during this mystery of transporting weirdness.

Lin Shaye has a brief, standout appearance as a religious woman who hears noises in the sky and has lost her grasp on everyday idioms.

And David Lanzenberg’s cinematography is eye-pleasing even while we are trapped in bunker-like quarantine.

Throughout the third act, though, the cat-and-mouse game grows more conventional. One starts to suspect the film is a little less trippy than it seemed; that whatever big revelation awaits us may be inadequate to explain the action leading to it. That’s more or less the case, though some sci-fi buffs will be satisfied with this tease that allows them to make up their own explanations. – Hollywood Reporter

If you liked Transcendence or Automata, you will like this.