The Signal is everything I had hoped Diary of the Dead (2008) would be—exciting, contemporary, and risk-taking.  And a Romero reference isn’t just relevant in that context, but also applies to the comparison The Signal invites to the master’s early work.  And with its dismal urban interiors and neighbor-on-neighbor shocks, it also recalls the vintage Cronenberg effort They Came From Within (1975). 

Indeed, the premise of civilization-coming-apart-at-the-seams is hardly new, but a few things help to set The Signal apart.  First, there’s the script by David Bruckner, Dan Bush, and Jacob Gentry, who also took turns directing each of the film’s three acts.  The script’s greatest strength is probably the skill with which it delivers its non-linear, recursive structure—the point-of-view keeps shifting and we obtain missing plot points retroactively through flashbacks, but none of this comes across as showing off or cutesy.  Which is pretty amazing considering that there are flashbacks-within-flashbacks, paradoxical flashbacks, and other tricky moves.  Rather, all of these narrative loop-de-loops are done to keep things unpredictable and to shift gears in intensity and tempo.  In other words, the reasons such devices probably should be employed.  Kind of refreshing, that.

As directors, Bruckner, Bush, and Gentry do a similarly solid job with another technique that is hardly groundbreaking—namely, using slides into and out of subjectivity to help viewers experience the madness of the characters.  Look once and there’s a faceless monster.  Look again and it’s your girlfriend.  Yet as “old hat” as that may sound, the actors’ timing and the tight editing manages to keep things fresh.  Moreover, the terrific job done by the four leads contributes to the film’s greatest success, which is making the state of psychosis, not the bloody mayhem that flows from it, so utterly terrifying.  The interplay between the characters’ self-righteous certainty and their somewhat pathetic second-guessing themselves is the most chilling thing about the film.

Not to say that The Signal doesn’t display unevenness.  In particular, the middle section is saturated with a sub-Shaun of the Dead brand of happy-gore-lucky irony that doesn’t connect tonally with the rest of the flick.  To be fair, though, the black comedy in this stretch is interesting in its own right, and I can easily see this being some fans’ favorite part; it’s just that it happened to pop me out of what was shaping up to be a fairly compelling story.  And it’s not as if Gentry doesn’t know straight-ahead horror.  For proof, check out his intro to his own nasty short film, The Hap Hapgood Story, which is included on the disc.

Also on the DVD are three additional “transmissions” from The Signal’s fractured city, Terminus.  These are webisodes that show the effects of the mysterious electronic pulse/broadcast beyond the lives of those we’ve seen in the movie.  By doing so, they hint at social catastrophe on a much grander scale, and I couldn't help thinking that this could be a promising premise for a TV series or miniseries.  Indeed, the final act of The Signal, which opens up the action to vast public sets such as a train station, is quite effective in staging and mood, and made me wish we hadn’t spent so much time in cramped locations that seemed to scream low-budget.  Yes, that’s sort of an infantile thing to wish for—that the filmmakers had had more money to work with.  I guess I’m just hoping that, whether as a team or as individuals, these guys have more resources the next time out.  Their vision and instincts on a scale of, say, 28 Days/Weeks Later, would really be something to behold.