'' Entertainment Weekly '' gave the film a " B " rating , saying , " Hard science fiction meets tender hearts in a slow-burn , twist-filled thriller ... The trio wind up in an abandoned shack in the middle of the Nevada desert , where they are attacked by forces unknown . It gets worse ! ... What is happening ? Will Nic escape ? And do we even want him to , given that the facility 's workers all wear protective suits when interacting with their guests/test subjects ? " The review concludes that " all this sounds like a souped-up episode of '' The Twilight Zone '' or '' The X-Files '' . " Nicolas Rapold of '' The New York Times '' wrote , " William Eubank 's '' The Signal '' demonstrates the fine line between paranoid science-fiction fantasy and demo reel ... After a brief excursion into found-footage horror , Nic wakes up in one of those antiseptic , white-walled secret compounds used for human experimentation in the movies . Mr. Eubank plays with our minds , and Nic 's , for a while . " Rapold judges that " the story evolves into a kind of poor man 's '' X-Men '' , " though " the grandiosity of the film 's setups partly fits in with the guys ' sense of righteous-geek drama , and you would n't be surprised to see Mr. Eubank directing a bigger-budget movie down the road ... " Michael O'Sullivan of '' The Washington Post '' gave the film a one-and-a-half star rating and a half-scathing review : " Two of the major plot turns in '' The Signal '' — a good-looking sci-fi thriller with more fashion sense than brains — hinge on misdirection involving simple arithmetic and spelling . I wo n't spoil the fun by elaborating further , but when each moment arrives , it 's cheapened by the implicit insult to the audience 's intelligence . The twists feel less like jolts of genuine surprise than like being had by a third-grader with a good knock-knock joke . " O'Sullivan adds , " I 'll say one thing : The general state of confusion fostered by the head-scratching plot is a surprisingly effective way of maintaining continued engagement with it — if by ' engagement ' you mean ' This better lead somewhere . ' Oh , it does . It 's just a less than wholly satisfying destination , despite some fun detours . ( Veteran character actress Lin Shay , in a nutty little cameo , is one such pleasure . ) " In contrast , '' USA Today '' wrote , " Had Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch made a movie together , it might have looked something like '' The Signal '' . Visually stunning , emotionally stunted and weird as all get-out , this sci-fi tale ( Geoff Berkshire , who watched the film at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival , gave a similarly admiring yet disappointed review , calling it " Indebted to both '' District 9 '' and '' The Blair Witch Project '' , but unlikely to enjoy either of those films ' sleeper success " : " Exceedingly stylish and ultimately quite silly , '' The Signal '' is a sci-fi head trip better appreciated for the journey than the destination . The less audiences know going in , the more intrigued they 'll be by the story 's not entirely predictable twists and turns . " He writes that when " the film pulls its flashiest twist , which turns Nic into something like the Six Billion Dollar Teen , " " it 's also the clear highlight of a film more interested in surface flash than in narrative coherence or character depth . "
2014 Sundance Film Festival
2014 Sundance Film Festival
The Signal (2014 film)