White Noise

Lorna decided we'd watch something different the other evening so, after some prodding, I gave in and jumped onto Netflix and let her have a trawl through the offerings. She came up with White Noise!

I should have listened to my internal alarms going off as it reminded me of another well-received/highly-awarded movie called Ordinary People and that was excruciatingly boring. But hey-ho, I went with it...to my cost.

It's not that the performances were poor or the cinematography was ropey. No, all of that was fine and the three main characters gave very decent performances. It's the fact that the dialogue is incessant, following an ordinary family of two Americans, Jack and Babette, with four kids. They're both on their fourth marriage, Jack's a college professor specializing in Hitler studies (seriously, only in America), and Babette and the kids are just annoying.

It's billed as an absurdist comedy drama but, while it's certainly absurd, it's no comedy. The plot centres around Babette's unreasonable fear of death and her use of an experimental drug to try and help with that.

Then a cataclysmic train crash casts a cloud of chemical waste over the town causing an "airborne toxic event" that forces a massive evacuation of the town with all the associated panic and huge traffic jams. While this is going on, Jack is trying to find out where Babette is getting her drugs from.

My head was nipping after about 20 minutes so I wouldn't recommend it as entertainment - 4/10 🙁