Virtually every low-budget sci-fi and horror film that’s released these days seems to hark back to the genre cinema of the 1970s and ’80s, which abounded in analog effects, actors who looked like everyday people, synth-heavy scores, and often blunt politics. Even at their crummiest, such productions felt handmade and personal.
Like his prior Synchronicity, Jacob Gentry’s Broadcast Signal Intrusion is in love with the tactility of genre films past, offering in this case a mixtape of vintage conspiracy thriller and horror tropes. But Gentry’s latest is more intriguing for the way he allows his deep nostalgia to rhyme with his hero’s, building the film up as an intense critique of cultural tunnel vison.
James (Harry Shum Jr.) is mourning the inexplicable disappearance of his wife. By night, he works for a Chicago television station, archiving old TV broadcast videos, and by day he repairs outdated equipment, Betamax machines and the like, from his apartment, which with its various mechanical bric-a-brac is barely distinguishable from his office. Gentry is clearly turned on by all this gadgetry—the cameras and recording devices—as well as the grainy, murky footage of the broadcasts themselves. James speaks to his boss via Post-its and keeps everyone else at arm’s length, enveloping himself in a cocoon of reassuringly tangible stuff—the sort of physical media that’s rapidly disappearing in the age of the cloud.
Pointedly, Broadcast Signal Intrusion is set in 1999, which some may see as the beginning of a cultural turning point toward techno-enabled myopia. The iPhone was a few years away from being released, and it was still possible to encounter someone who didn’t own a cellphone, but online culture was already in full swing, incubating various forms of self-absorption and disconnection—private societies that allow you to choose your own reality and era. Exploding that idea was the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, which was released that spring and offered up hackers as action heroes capable of exposing the horrible truth of the world’s existence—the ultimate conspiracy. For a while, Gentry fluidly connects all these associations in Broadcast Signal Intrusion, fashioning a kind of psychological math equation: Yearning for the past leads one to similarly minded cults, which leads to obsession and paranoia.
James stumbles upon a strange occurrence that allows him to unite his yearning for his missing wife with his need to retreat into a prior time and space. While transferring an old news program, he discovers a broadcast signal intrusion from 1987, in which a news station was hacked and footage of someone dressed in a pale, anonymous mask stands in a stark room and speaks in staticky screeches. At least one other such hacking was committed, and these crimes were investigated by the F.C.C. and F.B.I. to ultimately no avail. James grows obsessed with the videos, determined to find their origin, plunging into a rabbit hole of old TV shows, creepy alleys, and half-forgotten rumors. Eventually, it’s suggested that these crimes correspond with the disappearances of a few women, including his wife.
The film’s setup is promising, suggesting Brian De Palma’s Blow Out but with the horror element dialed up. Gentry, though, eventually gets lost in the woods along with his hero. It becomes apparent to us, probably quicker than Gentry and screenwriters Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall wish, that James isn’t going to discover the entire definitive truth of the videos. Of course, he can’t, because a good conspiracy is unsolvable, rooted in our need to make sense of the arbitrary. The filmmakers understand this idea, but it also means we have to watch James follow a trail of pointless bread crumbs that often feel like screenwriter conceits.
One particularly needless tangent finds James running an errand to get a secret file that turns out to be yet another warning of the futility of his sleuthing. Other flourishes suggest a youngish filmmaker trying out ideas for future projects, such as an elaborate montage—between a woman running down a stairway in slow motion and a man witnessing a suicide—that serves as nothing more than a chef’s kiss to De Palma, the master of such sequences.
Yet Gentry turns up the temperature just as you’re on the verge of writing Broadcast Signal Intrusion off as better-than-usual pastiche of ’80s-era thrillers. James discovers enough truth about the videos to drive him mad, and while this development is sudden, it’s still haunting, suggesting a sick person’s need to contort the irrational into rational shapes. One sequence, in which a potential torturer becomes the tortured, begging for mercy and crying and drooling through a white mask as James assumes the role of filmmaker-detective-slayer, punches through all the layers of homage to arrive at a place of true horror. The moment physicalizes and detonates the absorption and entitlement that social media inoculates on a daily basis.
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