|
Constable Graham McGahan has some problems. In addition to not being the best communicator in his romantic relationship and certainly not the most motivated police officer, he has recently developed a case of tinnitus. To those who don’t know, that is essentially ringing in the ears. Except in McGahan’s case, the tinnitus is unheralded: there was no mitigating factor to bring it on. This is worrisome to him to say the least, and it causes his already strained life to sag even further under its own weight. Things get considerably stickier, though, when he is transferred to light duty in a caravan and comes face to face with people dealing with the fallout from the recent mass murder on a train car. Including the massacre’s sole survivor…
...as well as someone who may or may not be the lunatic responsible for it.
Noise is one of four films in Topics Entertainment’s forthcoming Thrillers box set, and it is a difficult film to get a bead on. It is definitely a well-made film, but I’m not sure that makes it a good one. It takes place in a sleepy, if not exactly a bucolic small town in Australia, and is on the one hand an interesting slice of life, but on the other maddeningly colloquial. At first I thought the fact that I could rarely understand what anyone was saying was some sort of clever meta thing, like since McGahan was losing his hearing we would all lose our hearing. But no. It’s just that the film was not made for a foreign audience. It’s telling an Australian story, in an Australian way. Which is commendable. Even if annoying for the Yank having to rewind every five seconds.
|
The plot itself also falls into this nebulous middle ground. There is no denying the visceral gut punch of seeing a girl walk onto a train car and slowly twig to the fact that the other passengers are not being antisocial but have been brutally murdered. But then it shifts to the two detectives, and shifts again to McGahan and his titular hearing trouble. It stays with him for most of the rest of the runtime, but peppers us with his girlfriend, the kooky characters that revolve around the caravan, which includes the fiancé or another presumed victim of the train car killer, and still goes back to give us more with Lavinia (the survivor) and the two detectives. I just never felt like the movie gelled: it was neither a close personal drama nor an ensemble film.
|
 |
McGahan is also frustrating. We want to like him, because we spend a lot of time with him and we know he means well, but he’s just so damned ineffectual and frankly kind of stupid. He’s clearly content to glide through his days doing as little as possible, and his glib attitude and lack of attention to detail cause him to not figure out the danger he eventually finds himself in until it is way too late, and as an audience member I had a hard time feeling bad about it. I was too busy yelling, “Duh!”
 |
But maybe that was the point. One of the things I did like about the film was its realism. Whenever McGahan is faced with a confrontation, he is clearly nervous and shaken afterwards. Brendan Cowell does an excellent job in these scenes, especially when McGahan has to discharge his firearm to stop some thugs from beating up a developmentally disabled man. He holds the gun as straight as he can, and never shrinks from his duty, but he clearly looks like he is going to puke, cry, or both.
|
It was moments like that that ultimately saved the film for me. While it ends up being a fistful of spaghetti with tendrils dangling everywhere that never get served up on the plate properly, the earnestness of the characters and the degree of realism kept me engaged. Lucky Phil, the disabled young man in question earlier, is actually disabled, and one of the two detectives in the film has a cleft palette, which I assumed to be real. Don’t ask me why those things grabbed me, but they did.
| The end of the film is very bittersweet. It won’t make everyone happy, but it was the way it had to be. In the end I found Noise to be a challenging film, one that was as intriguing as it was frustrating. I invite everyone reading this to watch it for yourselves, and let me know what you thought about it. At the very least this is a film that will get people talking about it, and that is never a bad thing. |
 |
|
