It's different for everybody

It's the end of the world as we know it - again - in THE SIGNAL (2007), an independent horror flick lensed in Georgia. It's a gimmicky little number shot, edited and directed by three filmmakers and divided into three chapters, each following one of three characters.

Set in the fictional micrometropolis of Terminus (which recalls the island setting of THEY CAME FROM WITHIN), the story attends the plight of three individuals connected by the old marriage/infidelity impasse when a scrambled television signal turns the populace into homicidal lunatics. Romeroesque, yes; Cronenbergian, certainly... and Boyleish as all hell, but the hodgepodge mostly works. There's a wonderful gritty tension communicated in the film's first third (directed by David Bruckner), in which cheating wife Mya (Anessa Ramsey) awakens in the arms of lover Ben (Justin Welborn) and is gobsmacked by a wave of guilt and anxiety. Panicked at the manifestation of her own faithlessness, Mya flees into the night, rushing home to the judgment of her hulking exterminator husband (A. J. Bowen) and a world gone mad around her.

There's some coltishness here, with occasional imprecision in the writing (Mya's encounter with a strangely behaving man in a parking garage should have been suspense gold but just feels awkward and attenuated) and mismatched performances but the good far outweighs the bad. The filmmakers get a lot of apocalyptic bang for their limited buck, communicating the lowering doom via some sustained long shots (such as the one above) and cost effective small details - a crumpled car fender, a thin column of smoke on the horizon, a body lying prone on the asphalt, and the very sort of harsh human chatter that we've all become far too accustomed to tuning out - that sell the unraveling fabric of society.

The film falters during its second act (directed by Jacob Gentry), at which point THE SIGNAL turns into a Hal Hartley movie. It's not that teasing the humor out of this dark scenario is wrongheaded... it's just that the execution reeks of indie flick preciousness, that arch kind of presentational acting and tableau-style filming that Hartley borrowed from the French nouvelle vague. This approach might have worked in and of itself (the entire second act feels like a stage play) had the tone of the whole piece not been so strongly established in the first third; here, the style feels reductive and smug, with the dead weight of its irony dragging the whole venture down. There are still good ideas in this section, which advances brilliant notions about "the crazy" that make THE SIGNAL worthwhile and, dare I say it, important even given this unfortunate key change.

Unlike "the rage" of 28 DAYS LATER (2004) and its sequel 28 WEEKS LATER, the mood swings of the stricken in THE SIGNAL are informed by intelligence and choice. The result is not random violence but specific acts of aggression - it's just that the afflicted have a hard time straightening out who is who and wind up acting out their hostility on the wrong people. It's a true tale of our troubled times and a persuasive allegory about the evils of projection. The filmmakers pull off some impressively low tech tricks to show how the signaled see the objects of their anger in whomever they are with at the moment, putting a cynical spin on the old rock chestnut "if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with."

Even more intriguing is sussing out the particulars of the crazy and when exactly said craziness sets in. Characters like the apoplectic Rod (Sahr Ngaujah), who goes around his high-rise Robert Neville-style, killing his attackers with homemade weapons and duct taping into passivity people he's not so sure of, walk a fine line between insanity and amped-up survivalism - he's either out of his mind or the only one walking out of this thing alive. The jury's still out on that count when another character takes his head off with a shovel - but if you think that's the end of Rod, you don't know Rod.

While it's fairly certain that characters like "Hedge Clipper Steven" (Steven Westdahl, in a silently menacing bit as memorable as the old lady sweeping her broom across the line of advancing soldiers in THE CRAZIES), who skulks about the first act performing amateur tracheotomies, is certifiable, less certain but still troubling are seemingly harmless characters who manifest behavior just the slightest bit off... like Mya's neighbor, whose comforting embrace (in the moments before she's done in by Hedge Clipper Steven) seems too fervid, too suffocating... or even Mya herself, who steps through the carnage by strapping on her headphones and pointing herself toward the door.

Happily, THE SIGNAL swings back on-target in its concluding third (directed by Dan Bush), which reunites the wayward principals in the charmless Terminus Station. By this point, everybody's got a touch of the crazy but it's that we're never quite able to pinpoint where the madness begins is what makes the film worth watching and worth re-watching. It's a rare horror movie (and however the filmmakers may have endeavored to make more than just a horror movie doesn't knock this out of that category) that really cares about people, however maladroitly that concern occasionally comes across. There are some solid ideas and emotions in THE SIGNAL about the way we live and the way our lives intersect, even if we never see one another, or even if we see but refuse to acknowledge one another. And I've got to give it up for any zombie flick that ends with hugs. There just aren't enough hugs these days.