White Noise wants to be another M. Night Shyamalan movie, but it doesn't quite hit the mark. Michael Keaton carries the movie as everyone else is relegated to second-fiddle status. But Keaton is pretty good.

Jonathan Rivers is on his second marriage, his first ending in divorce. His son, from the previous marriage, spends time between his two parents. Just after Rivers' wife, Anna, tells him she is pregnant, things go from good to tragic. Anna disappears on her way home from meeting with a friend of hers. Rivers spends the next two weeks wondering what has happened to her.

One morning on his way to work, Rivers spots a stranger parked in a car across from his home. Later that day, he sees the same man watching his office. On first suspicion, this could be the police or a private investigator sent to keep an eye on him incase he had something to do with his wife's disapperance. When confronting the man, Rivers is introduced to Raymond Price. Price has been receiving special messages from Anna from beyond. Price calmly tells Rivers that his wife is dead, but she has been sending him messages through EVP, Extrasensory Voice Perception. This is the theory that the dead can communicate with the living through "white noise" that accompanies radio and tv static. Of course, Rivers thinks Price is looney, until strange things begin to happen to him. He hears Anna's voice on the stereo.

Rivers takes Price up on his offer to let him hear Anna's messages. When she communicates with him, Rivers is hooked on the concept, obsessively. Rivers begins buying special equipment and sets up a lab in his house, hoping to hear from Anna. He gets more than he bargained for.

White Noise takes a strange turn when Rivers begins getting EVP messages, trhough Anna, from people who aren't quite dead yet. First, a grandmother wants to get in touch with her granddaughter to tell her she has found her mother and they are happy together in the afterlife. Second, Rivers gets a message from a dying woman to go to a specific street. Using his car's mapping device, he locates a car wreck, and saves an infant moments before the crashed car is hit by power lines, killing the distraught mother who was sending Rivers the messages. Finally, Rivers receives a message from Anna regarding another missing woman. This leads Rivers to discover what actually happened to Anna during her disappeance.

White Noise is rather tedious, made interesting only by Keaton's performance as the obsessive, novice EVP investigator. Director Sax does not develop any suspense. There aren't any creapy scenes. The conclusion leaves more questions unanswered, like who are the three mysterious shapes that Rivers continully sees on his tv screen when bad things are going to happen. The three mysterious shapes appear at the end with tragic results, although the kidnapped woman is rescued by the police.

That is the worst element of White Noise, the ending does not make much sense. The movie should have been better. It should have been written with an ending that wraps things up, but it fails here.