Preview: White Noise

December 30 will see the wooden adaptation hit our Netflix feeds

Sophie McNally
6th December 2022
Image Credit: IMDb

Dark comedy pervades the entirety of the first glimpses we get at White Noise, but its oddity made it look more like an underfunded Interstellar spin-off or the estranged brother of Stranger Things.

November 22 saw the trailer's release. A near three-minute scramble of jolting hard cuts filled the audience in on the slew of unsettling and over-hyper family dynamics and natural disasters.

White Noise is a cinematic adaptation of Don DeLillo's book set for its release on Netflix on December 30. Yet so far the film is setting itself up as a monument to how not all bestsellers are fit for the silver screen so we should stop assuming every single one is fair game for adaptation. As this film is certainly not a patch on the likes of Where the Crawdads Sing or Dune.

Despite the film's decorated cast, (with a steely Adam Driver and creative candour of Greta Gerwig) the dialogue seemed stiffer than a secondary school play, and the intentional deadpan body language and gags were truly abysmal.

Speaking of misaligned intentionality, protagonist Jack Gladney's (played by Driver) accent was truly jarring. His speech seems to come out in awkward droves giving viewers more of an unsettling tone than is intended from this dark comedy.

Though to give White Noise the benefit of the doubt, the roots of a good film certainly could be there, with a quirky spin on the well-trodden narrative of a freak accident-turned-natural disaster (as barrels of train-bound toxic fluid collide and create a catastrophic 'airborne toxic event'). But the potential severely lacks any form of execution.

The plot seems mediocre at best, and the off-kilter mood exacerbates it —and its reams of shopping carts and normalised infidelity — to another level.

Though the film had a fairly positive reaction from its Venice International Film Festival debut, this should certainly be no indicator to audiences of the quality of the film itself.

Take a look at the trailer for yourself, and then immediately look into a mirror.

How confused did you look? Exactly.

AUTHOR: Sophie McNally
Deputy Editor, History undergraduate, UB's The Spectrum alum and former KultureHub staff writer.

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