Shortwave (2017)
Directed by Ryan Gregory Phillips
Written by Ryan Gregory Phillips
Starring Juanita Ringeling, Tina Feliciano, Nina Senicar, Kelly Fitzgerald
Release Date October 16th, 2024
Shortwave is at once exceptionally ambitious and completely insane. The film about a shortwave radio engineer and his wife dealing with the consequence of his having invented shortwave technology that can speak to lifeforms not of this Earth has remarkable ambition but lacks the budget and ability to meet that ambition. Part arty, pretentious nonsense and part low budget sci-fi exploitation, Shortwave is, at the very least unique.
The film begins with quite a good tracking shot as Isabel (Juanita Ringeling) leads her daughter into a bookstore and sits her down in a group of kids listening to a storyteller. Isabel then attends to the ladies’ room but when she comes out, all of the children, and the storyteller, are gone. Cut to some unspecified time later, a guilt-ridden Isabel barely registers emotions as she and her loving husband Josh (Cristobal Tapia Montt) move into a secluded new home.
Josh is an engineer working for a tech company that hopes to use shortwave radios to communicate with beings from another planet. The house belongs to the company and may or may not contain the secrets they’ve already discovered using Josh’s technology. As the couple settles slowly into their new home, Isabel begins to have strange visions related to the sounds on Josh’s radio, visions that she believes are clues to where she might find her daughter.
My description of the plot is much more direct than the film itself. Shortwave director Ryan Gregory Phillips wastes a great deal of screen time on arty pretentious nonsense. Shortwave is desperately padded by interminably long shots of Isabel posing in front of pretty outdoor backdrops. The blurry visuals at first seem like more arty pretentiousness until you see them in straight-ahead dialogue-based scenes and realize that the blurred edges may, in fact, be a shorthand to cover for the un-decorated portions of the set.
Find my full length review in the Futurism community on Vocal
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