2 out of 5

Director: Matthew Saville

Gorgeously constructed and elaborately pieced together for the viewer, ‘Noise’ is nonetheless so subtle as to be an exercise in frustration. This is firmly an indie film, one that’s trying to get us thinking not about what’s on the surface but what lies beneath. Normally I am in full support of such subversive cinema, and I didn’t dislike Noise – I would still suggest it, and rewatch it. But my favorite films that follow the non-formula embrace their medium to respect their audience. Noise takes a page from the Michael Haneke book, using everything on the screen as a tool to achieve something else. Haneke, I think, is a genius, and director Saville shows the same type of attention when putting his movie together. But you don’t always come out of the film feeling enriched, and ruminations are guided down a very direct path instead of letting us think what we want. Wait, you want to know what the movie is about? Oh. There is a massacre on a train, six (seven?) people shot, one girl survives, killer gets away There is an officer suffering from tinnitus who’s assigned to a caravan in the area of the murders in order to gather statements. Maybe the film is about solving the murders but not at all. The pieces are there, but Saville has more to say about the Austrailian Man, the nature of guilt and life and death. Noise (natch) plays a big part here, and I’m not the only one who felt that Saville was a bit cruel in his sound manipulation – dialogue is often so quiet you’re not sure if you’re supposed to hear it, and rewatching of scenes with max volume didn’t offer much insight. But that’s an indication of the scope: every piece is part of the vision. The sound, the images, the acting – all are wonderfully portrayed. But if you’re not in a specific mindset, ready to patiently weed through every piece of the puzzle, the runtime seems a bit extreme and you’ll watch, glassy eyed, wondering when the real plot is set to start.