“There are some threads you don’t want to unravel.” Widower James (Harry Shum, Jr.) is an observant man. A video archivist by trade in the late 90s, James spends his days logging old broadcast tapes for posterity, and his nights dreaming of his wife who disappeared years ago (11/22/96, according to a tattoo on his inner wrist). After discovering a bizarre tape with a Max Headroom-like “broadcast signal intrusion,” James embarks on an odyssey into a strange unsolved mystery that might be connected to his wife’s disappearance. “Broadcast Signal Intrusion” is another exercise in high tension from Jacob Gentry, whose 2007 film “The Signal” plays in a similar sandbox of sinister transmissions.
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An early ally in his journey is former FCC bigwig and Deepthroat avatar Dr. Lithgow (Steve Pringle), the first of many doomsayers to warn that “There are some threads you don’t want to unravel.” In what seems like a trajectory of Grecian fate, James pushes past multiple warnings to abort the quest: a shady proprietor (Madrid St. Angelo handing him a package cautions, “Things will be better for you if you don’t know what’s inside.” A now-homeless man (Michael B. Woods) who went down the same rabbit hole begs him, “Don’t start this, you don’t know what it does.” Co-writers Phil Drinkwater and Tim Goodall have inserted these archetypal fail safes, like the doomsayer of slasher movies, that James must meet, hear, and ignore every time to inch towards the fate that awaits him. Even his surroundings threaten; the color red shows up in backgrounds and payphones as he drives on at the risk of his job and safety, using the conspiracy to avoid processing his feelings around his wife’s sudden disappearance.
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Along the way he meets Alice (Kelley Mack), a cryptic ally who aids in the investigation, but she’s not around for long and it’s unclear as to her purpose in the story in the first place. Mack puts on a properly disaffected performance, but her role is of a half-finished femme fatale trope that deserved the care her noir-ish brethren get. Every other peripheral pawn in ‘Broadcast’s’ game is a scene-stealer: Steve Pringle’s professor is grave and commanding, Michael B. Woods ups the urgency dramatically with his wild-eyed mannerisms, and Chris Sullivan is responsible for the single most tense moment of the film entire. Tying it all together is Shum himself, keeping accusations of maudlin preachiness at bay with a balanced approach to his character’s messiness. A jaw clench here and a fidget there do the heavy lifting to present James as a man one frayed thread away from completely unraveling, In a story steeped in unreliability, a strong cast is necessary to disperse the distrust throughout every frame, and ‘Broadcast’ succeeds in cultivating that vibe.
The movie wears its influences proudly: callbacks to the works of Alan J. Pakula, “Videodrome,” “The Conversation,” and “Blow Out” infuse the narrative. Sarah Sharp’s stellar production design is integral to the ominous mood with tech equipment and rows of archives that threaten to swallow James whole, making him diminutive in comparison to whatever he’s getting into from the very beginning. Gentry teases a horror movie several times, with one effective part (with the aforementioned scene stealer Sullivan) seemingly lifted from the basement sequence of David Fincher’s “Zodiac.” Daniel Martin (whose fx work you’re familiar with if you’ve recoiled from the mayhem of “Host,” “Girl on the Third Floor,” and “Possessor”) created the intrusion tapes, which fictionalize the infamous Max Headroom and Tara the Android incidents into the equally off-putting SAL-E Sparx (James Swanton). Donning an uncanny feminine face mask and a wig, the figure menaces in fragmented images to the tune of distorted audio, all but inviting its viewers to dissect every frame as James does.
Despite Alice’s incomplete nature in the film, she does make its most important observation: “Sometimes you get so many answers, you forget the fucking question.” Muttered offhand, the line also articulates James’ inability to properly grieve the loss of his wife. As he reminisces about her, he lets slip with “I don’t know if she died” before correcting himself with “I wasn’t there when she died.” As a man whose job entails gazing upon images of the past, there’s a tragic poignancy to his need to behold her visually to confirm her existence. Little microcosms such as this leaven a routine item quest mystery into something more internally monstrous and transformative.
With a movie as enigmatic as this one, it helps to look towards its clearest influences in evaluating whether it succeeds or not. Without spoiling anything, it can be levied that ‘Broadcast’s’ ending isn’t dissimilar to those same thrillers of decades past in their unsettled presentation of conclusion without resolution. As Joe Turner found in “3 Days of the Condor,” finding an answer is very different from gaining closure. Jack Terri solved his big obsessive mystery in “Blow Out,” but he was a shell of a man, taking withered drags of a haggard cigarette by the time the credits roll. So, when James finds the answer that he’s been searching for, Gentry has set aside little relief for the audience, but that’s part of the larger architecture of dread that envelops the film, the pregnant space surrounding grief and how we allow ourselves to navigate it. A few bits of static in the script aside, “Broadcast Signal Intrusion” is a crisp transmission on the human impulse to make sense of the profound.
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