The Signal is a strange movie. Not because of its structure or story, but more because it wasn’t at all what I had expected it to be. From all the marketing, I thought this was going to be a pretty serious, and potentially scary, ultra-violent horror film. The violence was there, but the majority of the film tends to be more humorous than scary. I’m not sure if this was intended or not, but it does sort of work … just not as well as it could have.

Directed by the trio of David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry, The Signal follows three main characters as they struggle to survive [in the most primal sense] amidst an apocalyptic scenario brought upon by a mysterious transmission being emitted from televisions and radios, or any other form of electronic communications device. The carnage kicks off when Lewis flips out and Mya witnesses him kill their friend, followed by everyone in his path. Mya manages to escape, but now she has both her husband Lewis and her lover Ben looking for her …  and to make matters worse, no one can be trusted not to have “the crazy.”

At one point, one of the characters in the film theorizes that there’s a frequency that essentially makes humans crazy by disrupting synapses in the brain and that the filter for this frequency must have gone off-line. Other than this one brief suggestion, there’s no real explanation for what’s going on in The Signal. Instead, we are taken through a series of character interactions riddled with paranoia, deception and of course ultra-violence. However, the film maintains a morbidly dark sense of humor during the majority of the film’s plot, often reminding me of films like Very Bad Things or Shallow Grave. Not a great film, but worth a look if you’re into this sort of visually assaulting movie that’s weak on plot.

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