Netflix R-Rated Dark Comedy Mystery With Star Wars Icon Divides Audiences

I don’t want to be overly dramatic here, but I think White Noise might actually be the most aggravating movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life.

Maybe I can blame it on not being familiar with the source material, building my expectations based on the trailer, or just generally being a fan of Baumbach’s last several efforts before this one, but this movie had me walking around my home with a scowl for at least a day and a half. 

White Noise centers on Adam Driver’s professor Jack Gladney. Despite his inability to speak German or properly read German texts, Gladney launches a controversial curriculum known as “Hitler Studies” in his Ohio university, which attracts a wide array of academic curiosities.

Jack is married to a woman named Babette (Greta Gerwig), his latest of four wives, and the two share a blended family loaded with multiple children from their past marriages.

The lives of the Gladney clan are severely interrupted when a massive train derailment leads to a spread of airborne toxins, causing the entire town to evacuate to a safe zone.

After pandemonium breaks out in the safe zone, the characters scramble to escape with their lives intact, just barely managing to get out of the rush of infected people after crashing their car into a river and floating away. At this point in White Noise, it seems as though the plot is finally ready to kick into high gear, but Baumbach apparently had other plans.

Instead, right as the film starts to get truly exciting, we cut to a title card that reads “9 days later” and the family is simply allowed to go home and resume life as normal, like the entire first hour of the movie never happened.

This abrupt change in pace and story gave me whiplash, but it doesn’t end there. In the latter half of White Noise, Babette joins some kind of bizarre experimental drug trial, with a creepy man named Mr. Gray who seems to have been pulled directly from Jack’s deranged hallucinations.

After tracking down Mr. Gray at a seedy hotel, Jack shoots him, only to then surrender his still-loaded gun, offering Gray an opportunity to shoot both Jack and Babette.

Then, the three of them become fast friends while tending to their wounds, and I swear to god I’m not making this up, attend a hospital run by a group of atheist German nuns. 

White Noise ultimately concludes with an ill-advised dance number that feels like it was created by some kind of poorly-constructed artificial intelligence, ending the film on a truly baffling note.

The quirky setups in the first act really got me hooked, but I never recovered after having the rug pulled out from under me in the middle of the movie.

The entire back half of White Noise makes absolutely no sense to me at all, as the characters begin to deviate strongly from their pre-established characteristics, events seem to materialize with no warning or foreshadowing, and everything concludes with no consequences.

The entire movie feels like watching somebody else’s fever dream and trying to interpret how they visualize the world around them. 

GFR SCORE

At the end of the day, White Noise at least has solid cinematography, a well-constructed period setting, and some compelling performances from the likes of Adam Driver and Don Cheadle.

Still, as far as I’m concerned, all of that is wasted on a movie that somehow pales in comparison to The Happening. For me, this is a 1 out of 5, but you might find something to really enjoy about it, so feel free to stream White Noise on Netflix today.