THE SIGNAL

THE SIGNAL. William Eubank, dir., co-script, with Carlyle Eubank and David Frigerio. USA: Automatik Entertainment, Low Spark Films (prod.) / Focus Features (US dist., KVH Media Group), 2014.

Relatively small, stylish film combining recent Gothic motifs — three friends on the road (two male, one female, the male and female lovers), exploring a threatening "Cabin in the Desert"— with science fiction that starts with very much today's computer technology and gets increasingly high-tech fantastic. Students of the portrayal of disability in popular culture should note that the male lead starts out the film in early-stage multiple sclerosis and is cured — and then some! — with prosthetic legs, making him, in the words of the antagonist for most of the film, "the perfect integration of human will and alien technology. Our finest achievement." Except the other male friend has prosthetic arms and hands of great power and, in a surprise ending, the antagonist has a high-tech, possibly cybernetic prosthesis as the back of his head, ROBOCOP (1987) style. (The female lead does not seem to have prosthetic "superpowers," although we may have missed something.)

See for threatening enclosure in a high-tech but elegantly spare and Modernist medical/military building, that appears to be and in a sense is underground — yielding visually the motif of "the mechanized underworld." Note contrasting of that sterile hospital/prison space with flashbacks/vision-or-dream sequences of a healthy and healthful wooded "Greenworld" and a carnival: for settings for the enacting of friendship and love. Compare and contrast the underworld and recalled Greenworld with effectively-shot scenes on the American desert. In a surprise ending with mystic overtones, the camera reveals (though SpFX) that the action of the film has taken place on some sort of huge space station, one that looks something like an Industrial version of the Mothership in CLOSE ENCOUNTERS with anorexia. For the final revelation of the setting on a huge spacecraft cf. and contrast DARK CITY.

Note: There is one sexist term in the dialog plus the use, unnoted in the IMDb guide for parents, of an ethnic slur-word that needs to be understood in the context of the "busting" folkway among very close friends — trading insults — and which might well have been cut for a PG-13 movie.