I already have one horror film with the title The Signal in my life. Now Focus Features is trying to sell me on another.

This new Signal, while still focusing on some sort of signal, looks to be a vastly different film. Unlike the bleakly humorous 2007 indie, this film can be described with a number of recent moviemaking’s favorite adjectives: grim, ominous, bleak, humorless, and so forth. I see slow motion action shots, washed out scenes lacking any color, and, if I had to guess, a problem threatening the fate of the entire world.

There’s something truly foreboding about this new trailer, though, almost as if someone who actually knows what he’s doing is behind this film. That man is William Eubank, who directed and wrote Love, and was the cinematographer for the Dave Bautista-starring House of the Rising Sun.

That’s the thing with The Signal – we don’t know anything about it. There’s this viral campaign. There’s a signal. It’s most likely alien. Brenton Thwaites has been affected by it, probably. The government in some form, mostly the form of a Hazmat-suited Lawrence Fishburne, is trying to figure out what the signal is or does. Hopefully his character here is better at his job than his character in Hannibal. Things, as they so often do, seem to go terribly wrong.

That’s about it. As you can see at the tail end of the trailer, Marshall Fine of HuffPo compared it to District 9. That’s what it seems to be going for, in terms of imagination, and it even kind of looks like District 9. We’ll see on June 13, when the film is set for release. Perhaps it will be the sleeper sci-fi hit that D9 was.

The synopsis, posted below via /Film, illuminates a lot more, most of which I did not get an inkling of in the trailer. So, not so many spoilers in the trailer below, but a few spoilers in the synopsis even further below.

Three college students on a road trip across the Southwest experience a detour; the tracking of a computer genius who has already hacked into MIT and exposed security faults. The trio find themselves drawn to an eerily isolated area when suddenly, everything goes dark. When one of the students, Nic, regains consciousness, he is in a waking nightmare… The Signal stars Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp and Laurence Fishburne and is directed by William Eubank.

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Tyler Hanan

Tyler raves about movies on the Let The Right Films In podcast. Listen to him make jokes over his beleaguered cohost Kayla St. Onge and their more qualified guests who deserve so much better at soundcloud.com/ltrfipod. Find him on Twitter @tylerhanan.

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