Noise

Director: Matthew Saville
Screenwriters: Matthew Saville

Institute History

  • 2007 Sundance Film Festival

Description

This is a story about the wrong person in the right place at the wrong time. Two heinous crimes have left a suburban town reeling. Police quickly connect them but are desperate for witnesses as the local community enfolds itself in a shroud of secrecy, borne from fear and an untrammeled mistrust of authority.

A young police constable, Graham McGahan, suffers from a chronic hearing problem and applies for worker's compensation. To his chagrin, he is stationed at a police caravan near the crime scene. Living on the periphery of the investigation, McGahan crosses paths with the various people affected by the tragedies and uncovers an unraveling nightmare of guilt and suspicion.

Writer/director Matthew Saville utilizes exquisite sound and production design to bring to life his astonishing script. Saville shifts the police thriller genre away from the familiar and onto the fringe with a fascinating effect. Rather than following the killer or the investigating officers, Noise looks at the ramifications of the events on the everyday people. This perspective creates a far richer exploration of what it means to be a hero or a victim. Noise fuses art and genre as well as any film in recent memory to construct a humanistic portrait of a flawed man searching for a thread of hope.

— Trevor Groth

Screening Details

Credits

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