James (Harry Shum Jr) works at a studio transferring old television broadcasts onto a digital archive. His wife disappeared years earlier, and he attends a support group with similar people. While working his way through a tape from 1987, he comes across a disturbing pirate transmission that interrupted a late-night news programme. He digs into the on-air hacking further and finds out it happened several times, each disruption including a similar, horrific-looking mask-wearer. No culprit was ever found. As James teams up with enthusiastic Alice (Kelley Mack) to delve deeper into the mystery, things become more twisted.
It would be lazy to compare the premise of Broadcast Signal Intrusion to Videodrome. While Cronenberg’s film is no doubt in the DNA of director Jacob Gentry’s movie, the similarities are only superficial. There’s also a healthy dollop of Brian De Palma in his visual style. Gentry weaves a conspiracy tale through a neo-noir lens set in the days when the Internet was mainly just bulletin boards – but was as full of crackpot ideas and hearsay as today. The script – by Phil Drinkwater and Tim Woodall – is full of twists and enigmatic monologues.
Shum Jr is superb as the obsessed loner who replaces mourning his missing wife with a quest to get to the bottom of the eerie pirate signals. But, as he and Alice get deeper down the rabbit hole, the fixation begins to take over his life.
Being set in the ‘90s, the movie is packed full of obsolete equipment, and the attention to detail with the vintage footage is spot-on. This is augmented with a suitably broody jazz soundtrack from Brian Lovett (The Ritual), which is full of horns and suspenseful cues. If nothing else, the pale, rubber masks of the intrusive footage will haunt you for quite a while.
Broadcast Signal Intrusion is available on digital now.
