Review of White Noise (2022)
Seen in 2023.
A charismatic college professor in 1984 Ohio tries to shepherd his talkative family through two unrelated crises: A toxic spill and a corrupt medical experiment.
The acting is good; the eclecticism works until the Lynchian finale at the motel; the Christian-hospital denoument doesn’t work at all. I watched this two weeks after the 2023-02-02 train crash in East Palestine, Ohio, which produced a similarly ominous black cloud of pollution (controlled burn of vinyl chloride), a similarly contradictory evacuation effort, and a similarly bizarre debate about fear and risk, but without this film’s Freudian preoccupations and bad science fiction.