Actor Michael Keaton makes a rare appearance in the new occult horror movie, WHITE NOISE. The movie is about an occult subject, Electronic Voice Phenomena, where, allegedly, people receive recorded audio messages from dead people, angels, gods, goddesses, spirits, and/or aliens. The Christian, biblical view of such contacts is that: A) The messages and recordings are fake, phony and/or imaginary; or, 2) The messages and recordings are demonic. Either way, such contacts are evil and lead people away from the truth of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and the truth of God’s Word written, the Bible.

WHITE NOISE stars Keaton as Jonathan Rivers, an architect whose second wife, Anna, mysteriously disappears when she was supposed to return home after a dinner with her female friend. A man, Raymond Price, one day shows up at Keaton’s house and his work, telling Jonathan that he has had contact from Anna, who, he says, is dead. When Anna’s corpse turns up, Jonathan goes to see Raymond, who’s turned his living room into a recording studio to find messages from dead people in the "white noise" of fuzzy TV images, unclear broadcast frequencies and garbled tape recordings.

Unknown to Raymond or Jonathan, some evil ghosts or spirits are lurking. Raymond turns up dead, and Jonathan becomes obsessed by EVP sounds and images on TVs and video recordings. He even neglects and scares his young son.

Jonathan begins to believe that he’s getting messages from Anna urging him to help save the lives of people in danger. Things come to a head when he investigates the disappearance of a woman who turns out to be one of Raymond’s EVP clients.

WHITE NOISE not only gives credence to the evil occult subject of EVP, it also contains a scene with a blind medium, who is depicted as having a real occult ability. The medium admonishes Jonathan that people need a "spirit guide" to talk to the dead, because some of the dead people are very nasty. Her warnings to Jonathan actually turn out to be true. Thus, the whole movie is an advertisement for spiritualism, an evil occult theology that has led hundreds of millions of people, if not billions of people, astray.

At the end of the movie, there is a funeral scene with a minister or priest talking briefly about "eternal life." As with many occult advocates, this scene represents an example of pagan syncretism, a false non-Christian ideology that tries to lure people into evil theological positions by presenting to them a superficial semblance of Christian thinking and Christian symbols. The Christian content is particularly superficial in WHITE NOISE, which does, however, have some stronger moral elements to it. For example, Jonathan partly becomes obsessed with EVP because he wants to help other people who are in distress and/or grieving. Even an occultist has to borrow or steal from Christianity and the Bible at times in order to make sense of the real world in which they live.

Mr. Keaton gives a competent performance in WHITE NOISE, but not the kind of original, appealing performances he gave when he first started out in Hollywood. The rest of the cast is serviceable, as is the writing and direction by Geoffrey Sax and Niall Johnson, respectively.

WHITE NOISE also contains many scary scenes, some violence and some foul language. It is not these, however, that make the movie ultimately abhorrent: it is the movie’s dangerous occult worldview, which is truly evil and extremely deceptive. That is why God, Jesus Christ and Christ’s disciples all condemn it in both the Old and New Testaments.

On that note, it is interesting to point out that the main organization advocating alleged EVP transmissions, the American Association of EVP, never takes a Christian or biblical worldview regarding them. In fact, the group never says, as far as we could tell, that demonic activity may be part of much, all or even some of the supposed transmissions from the supernatural. For example, the group’s website talks about possible transmissions from dead people, angels, gods, goddesses, spirits, devas (a Hindu word for gods, goddesses and spirits), and aliens. The words demon, Satan or Devil are not used, however. The group places a pseudo-scientific veneer over all of this, but there is no mention of any kind of double-blind scientific tests, which would be an excellent way to prove the real scientific basis for believing in or rejecting such transmissions. The group does note, however, that the more that people get involved with EVP, the more likely they are to get recordings of such alleged transmissions from dead people. This strongly indicates to us that EVP is a completely phony and imaginary phenomenon, as well as a demonic one.

© MovieGuide, 2005. Used by permission. Visit www.movieguide.org for more reviews.