FILMS/
THE SIGNAL
Spotlight
USA, 2006, 99 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Sat, May 5 / 10:00 / Kabuki / SIGN05K
Mon, May 7 / 01:15 / Kabuki / SIGN07K
CREDITS
- prod
-
Alexander A. Motlagh, Jacob Gentry
- scr
-
David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry
- cam
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David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry
- editor
-
David Bruckner, Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry
- mus
-
Ben Lovett, Matthew Compton, Paloma Udovic
- cast
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Anessa Ramsey, Sahr Ngaujah, AJ Bowen, Matt Stanton, Shehyt El-Ahar, Justin Welborn, Cheri Christian, Scott Poythress
- source
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Magnolia Pictures, 49 West 27th Street, 7th Floor, New York, NY 10001 FAX: 212-924-6742 EMAIL: bwestcott@magpictures.com
Thwarting expectations at every turn, a trio of Atlanta-based filmmakers offers up a clever and gruesome satire of media and modern technology using a spookily effective tripartite form. Taking cues from Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s classic J-horror film Pulse and Stephen King’s recent novel Cell, this late-night chiller takes place in a town called Terminus where things have gone nutso, apparently the result of a trippy visual signal coming through the residents’ television sets. As a seemingly immune woman named Mya sets out for home after an adulterous tryst, she finds a strange man bleeding in a parking garage and a murderous spouse in her apartment. As the action and gore quickly escalate to a bloody froth, the film abruptly shifts to a more comedic vein and focuses on a suburbanite preparing for a New Year’s Eve party—with just the small matter of her dead husband to set things awry. As characters from the first segment pop up in surprising places, the filmmakers make it clear that their goal is to mess with our heads and play with preconceived notions of genre and tone. With its group of talented actors and range of playful cinematic references, including nods to ’70s grindhouse classics, The Signal offers an unsettling mix of absurd humor and explicit gore with a melancholy existential undercurrent. As one philosophical character opines, "You had to kill those people; they were keeping you from happiness."
—Rod Armstrong
West Coast Premiere. Sponsored by Stella Artois. Presented in association with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.