Most famously, perhaps, embodied by his 2007 film, The Signal, in which a mysterious broadcast signal turns ordinary people into murderous beasts. Overtly reminiscent of films like Brian de Palma's Blow Out, Antonioni's Blow Up, and especially Paul Schrader's Hardcore and Joel Schumacher's 8MM, Broadcast Signal Intrusion highlights director Gentry's obvious obsession with technology as a corrupting tool. One such comrade is a manic-pixie-hackergirl named Alice (Kelly Mack), who leads him even further down the rabbit hole – get it, Alice. This leads him from one early internet sleuth to another, each of grungier than the last, in search of answers. Most of James's research comes from primitive capital-I Internet bulletin boards, (BBS), a kind of safe space for social outcasts who found comfort in anonymously connecting with other outcasts of similar ilk. Curiosity quickly turns to mania, which rapidly turns into a full blown obsession, especially when he begins to connect these pirate broadcasts to a series of missing women, laying bare his own open wounds regarding his missing and presumed dead wife.īroadcast Signal Intrusion indulges in a very particular brand of late '90s introvert nostalgia. Coping by burying himself in a job that practically necessitates isolation, James leaves himself largely closed off to the outside world, but open to focus a tremendous amount of time and energy to this mystery that has him rapt. Shum's James is a man mourning the loss of his wife, who'd disappeared a few years before the events of the film unfold. By positing a scenario in which this particular brand of civil disobedience – breaking into TV broadcasts with eerie, cryptic messages – leads to an actual malevolent mastermind, Gentry taps into a rich history of similar conspiratorial cinema, but still seems to fizzle out in the end. Inspired by the pirate broadcast signal intrusions of the '80s and '90s, Gentry's film imagines a deep well of evil and violence behind what was largely a showcase for misanthropic hackers with too much time on their hands. Tumbling down a conspiratorial rabbit hole, James bounces from one clue to the next, all the while bringing this increasingly macabre puzzle closer and closer to a personal tragedy that leaves him unable to walk away. In Jacob Gentry's Broadcast Signal Intrusion, video archivist James (Harry Shum, Jr.) in the late '90s loses himself in a mystery that turns out to be more sinister than he ever could've imagined when he stumbles across an odd snippet of disturbing video while working. There's something about the unexplained and seemingly unexplainable that can turn the most rational person into a conspiracy theorist when they start to look too closely at details that were never meant to be put under a microscope.
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