Chicago, 1999. Video archivist James (
Glee's Harry Shum Jr), haunted by the disappearance of his wife Hanna, stumbles across a surreal, nightmarish, clip of a "broadcast signal intrusion" - a mysterious pirate hack of a televised signal.
Fascinated, he starts to dig deeper, learning that these signal hacks are extremely rare and the authorities have managed to track down those responsible for all except for the one that initially triggered James's interest.
He discovers that not only was this one of a pair of known intrusions, but there was possibly a third as well.
Mixed up with all this is the fact that a woman supposedly disappeared, probably kidnapped and maybe murdered, the night before each intrusion - and the last one was the night after his wife disappeared.
Instead of reporting her to the police, James teams up with Alice (Kelley Mack), a strange woman who follows him one night, for nebulous reasons.
Together they disappear down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, crossing paths with a selection of enigmatic and oddball characters, as James becomes increasingly paranoid on his dual quest to find out who created the "broadcast signal intrusion" and what happened to his wife.
Starting from a similar space as the far-superior
Archive 81,
Broadcast Signal Intrusion instead apes
True Detective (
poorly) using this elaborate, potential Creepypasta urban legend to obfuscate a very linear murder mystery.
I'll confess I was hoping for another
Archive 81, Deadwax, or
Cigarette Burns.
Being inspired by true events (
there were actual signal intrusions of a similar nature in the mid-to-late '80s), I had high hopes as to what fantastical journey the movie would take its conspiracy theory-driven protagonist on.
However, of all the potential stories that could have sprung from this set-up, a poor man's Batman adventure - where the villain leaves a trail of breadcrumbs that only the protagonist can follow (despite years of investigations by various branches of the government and law enforcement) - was a major let-down.
There are films where you can recognise their greatness early on, but there are others - usually mystery stories - where everything hangs on the final reveal, which can make or break the audience's investment in the piece.
Sadly, as became increasingly clear as the 104-minute movie dragged on, the climactic revelation of Broadcast Signal Intrusion, despite being dressed up in the trappings of James's dramatic dive into insanity, raised little more than a shrug and a underwhelmed "oh, was that it?" reaction.
For all the smoke-and-mirrors, James' unearthing of this great secret is mindbogglingly straight-forward, with the only real mysteries being the unexplained comings and goings of the small coterie of supporting characters.
Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall's script, directed by Jacob Gentry, was riddled with convenient coincidences, inconstancies, and plot holes that you were probably expected to hand wave away with a "that's the nature of the beast" get-out-of-jail-free card.
But filmmakers have to earn that sort of trust from their audience and Broadcast Signal Intrusion falls well short.
