Turn to a scrambled channel on your TV that you don’t subscribe to. Think you can make something out? It might be a ghost, according to White Noise.

Minute after minute, Jonathan Rivers, played by Michael Keaton, stares at his numerous television sets waiting for something to happen. So does the audience.

White Noise, released on DVD Tuesday, is at times a thriller, quite dull during other parts, but mostly somewhere in the middle. It’s scary, not because of the ghosts in the television set or the black shadows that haunt Rivers, but because the sound changes from absolute quietness to bursts of screams. It would make anyone’s heart pound to witness such a sudden change in decibels.

But when the film tries to use images, not sounds, to cause fear, it fails. What is shown is more humorous than scary, and the anticlimactic ending will leave you wanting more, because you invested time watching the film and you will hope for a more shocking ending.

Rivers loses his wife Anna, who dies in a car crash. Before police find her body however, he is followed by Raymond Price, a man who tells him that he is electronically receiving messages from Anna. He brushes him off at first, but when told about Anna’s death, he visits Price at his home and witnesses the messages for himself.

Soon, the messages turn to warnings?warnings on how to save other people. That’s right: living husband and dead wife team up to save people! The headlines write themselves.

There are other twists and turns, most coming in the middle of the movie, which is why the end is so disappointing. Spaced out more and the movie has a better chance of surviving.

Keaton is boring, though it may be due to the material he is given. Anyone short of a reincarnated James Dean or Jesus would be boring to watch sitting in front of scrambled television.

The bonus material is also disappointing. A few features on real-life stories of the paranormal, some deleted scenes? call me a skeptic but after watching the film, I wasn’t in the mood to start my own scrambled tape collection. I’ll leave the dead alone, thank you very much.

1.5*/5*
whitenoisemovie.com/voices