Film review: White Noise is an ambitious attempt to capture the chaos of day-to-day existence

It is a cleverly constructed satire but by the end, it’s unclear as what exactly is being satirised, or to what end

White Noise stars Adam Driver as Jack, an American academic who is an expert in Hitler studies. Picture: Netflix

★★★☆☆

Set in 1984, White Noise (15A) stars Adam Driver as Jack, an American academic who is an expert in Hitler studies. He and his wife, Babette (Greta Gerwig), along with their unruly brood of precocious children, are just about managing to surf “the incessant flow of information” that flows through the American airwaves as the story begins, but soon their lives are hugely disrupted by a toxic airborne event when a train carrying potent chemicals is derailed near their town. 

Shocked into finally thinking about their lives and what it all means, Jack and Babette find themselves staring down the barrel of their own mortality. Adapted from Don DeLillo’s novel by director Noah Baumbach, White Noise is an ambitious attempt to capture the chaos of day-to-day existence (at times we get Altmanesque soundscapes as multiple conversations flow in and around one another, and tightly edited collisions of random images). By contrast, the actors are controlled and excessively formal in the midst of all this audio-visual bedlam, their dialogue delivered in a deliberately arch and performative style. The effect is striking, emphasising how Jack and Babette are bewildered by the sensory overload and striving to maintain even the semblance of control, but while Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig are both excellent in illustrating the point, it’s difficult to care for their overly choreographed characters, at least by comparison with Baumbach’s far more organic and engaging characters in Marriage Story (2019). White Noise is a cleverly constructed satire, certainly, but by the end it’s unclear as what exactly is being satirised, or to what end.

(Netflix)