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• #Harry shum jr broadcast signal intrusion series#

In Broadcast Signal Intrusion, there is nothing supernatural at play, despite the heaps of coincidences and creepy mood that permeates this story. They are stories where the impossible ultimately is real, and where the truth is a trap set to ensnare the main character. Or maybe he’s just looking for someone to blame.Īt first, I wanted to compare Broadcast Signal Intrusion to other mystery-to-madness tales like Angel Heart or Videodrome, but those aren’t really fair comparisons. He’s trying to find out what happened to his wife. James is hooked, but he isn’t trying to solve the mystery of the pirate broadcasts at all. And wouldn’t you know, there’s rumors of a third pirate broadcast from 1996, just a day after his wife Hannah went missing. As he unravels the mystery of the broadcasts, the mystery of James also unspools. However, when he learns that each of these pirate broadcasts happened to coincide with a report of a missing woman, he becomes obsessed. On the surface, he seems like a man that could use a distraction. He attends a grief support group, and he only places phone calls through telephone booths. Odder and odder.Īs for James himself, we don’t know much about him at the start. He checks the archives, only to find that the tape of the next incident was seized by the FCC years ago.

#Harry shum jr broadcast signal intrusion series#

In fact, what he saw was only the first in a series of such interruptions. Through message boards, he learns that it was inspired by an old sitcom and that the pirates were never caught.

That, on its own, was curious enough to catch his interest. It’s a creepy vignette featuring a stranger in a rubbery mask. On one such tape he catches sight of a mysterious pirate broadcast that briefly interrupted the nightly news in 1987. In 1999, James is an archivist who spends his nights duping old broadcast tapes onto DVD to save shelf space. It all depends on what question James is really asking - and what questions he chooses to ignore along the way. There’s AN answer to be found in the film’s climax, but perhaps not THE answer. This is not a mystery that barrels toward a single inescapable conclusion. What makes this descent down the proverbial rabbit hole a little different from others, though, is precisely how subjective the journey itself becomes. OK, so I’m pretty sure I butchered the quote, but that’s the gist of what Alice (Kelley Mack) tells James (Harry Shum Jr.) late in Broadcast Signal Intrusion, a noir-ish psychological thriller about one man’s pursuit of a conspiracy that hits a little too close to home. “You spend so long looking for answers that you forget the f**king question.”