In 50 words or less: Unexplained digital communique wreaks havoc with the psyche. Half the people who hear it become infected with murderous rage; other half run and hide to greatest extent possible. Perhaps occurs in a fictional (science fictional?) city that is somehow isolated from the rest of the world. Marital dysfunction and idealized infidelity ensues.

Do you have the crazy? Maya and Lewis don’t get along so hot, and now she’s cheating on her (abusive?) husband with Ben — a good-looking, sensitive soul who wants Maya to run away with him and/or stay in bed, whichever is more convenient. Maya initially declines both invitations. When the feces become airborne, Ben and Maya struggle to reconnect from their respective sides of the city. Lewis violently objects.

Spoilers to Follow

The Signal is presented in three parts, or “transmissions” — each directed by a different party. If you are unaware of this when entering the theater, you’ll figure it out soon enough. But this isn’t a Grindhouse sort of affair. This isn’t a set of thematically related stories being told by individuals; it’s one story told by three distinct parties with differing motives and styles. Therefore, I’ll treat these three vignettes individually, as they are offered.

Transmission #1: The first installment is damn near pitch perfect. It’s an explosive set-up presented as a quick, effective character study of people in peril with unknown enemies and uncertain sanity, and it does a very good job of getting the ball rolling. If I were forced to name a weakness, I might say that Ben is a smidge too-good-to-be-true, and Maya isn’t a very good liar when confronted by her husband about her whereabouts; but Lewis is a suitably menacing maniac and the chaos that unfolds is grim, bloody, and appropriately confusing.

Transmission #2: The gears shift sharply when Maya crashes her car and sets off on foot, leaving the car to be discovered by Lewis — in hot pursuit of his wife, who he must protect from all the other loonies (or so he believes, in his homicidally muddled state). Lewis doesn’t find Maya, but he does interrupt a New Year’s Eve celebration that’s gone horribly, comically wrong.

The first chunk of Part Deux is honestly funny — which is a real trick after the uncompromising nightmare of the first installment. At first I was annoyed by the 90-degree turn in tone, but it grew on me; and before long I was rolling with it. Unfortunately, the black humor derails somewhere around the middle of the scene. There’s a shift attempted, as the story struggles to return to the chaotic terror of the first third. The gears jam. The shift fails.

Transmission #3: Return of the Ben starts off promising and devolves into an impossible adventure wherein the villain is almost completely indestructible and the good guys, Ben and his new friend Clark, are inexplicably, repeatedly seized by a suicidal panic that leaves them frozen with terror. Several times they have a clear upper hand, but no one ever grabs the moment by the short hairs and yanks. Instead, Lewis is permitted to live another day and dole out increasingly unlikely beatings, heroic-thwartings, and spittle-flecked madness.

My problems with the story are many and varied, and they are only exacerbated by how truly fine the first Transmission was. #2 drops the ball midway in an attempt to tie black humor to snuff-level violence with a series of awkward segues that are too bleak to be funny and too silly to be horrific.

#3 devolves into a super-hip, meta-riffic post-modern slog that folds back in on itself like an origami gymnast. The audience is repeatedly tricked with false flashes of story, as if the director wants to give the viewers the phony flashbacks and bring the theater itself into the delusion — and hey, that’s ambitious, sure. Look, I didn’t mind when the characters hallucinated or daydreamed; they were entitled. But this was not the narrative manipulation of Shyamalan. The Signal doesn’t misdirect the audience, it habitually lies, painstakingly unraveling its own credibility again and again.*

At least — and here I must give credit where credit is due — it doesn’t take the hateful, plunging misstep I feared at the end. It sets up the possibility of “Oops, perhaps I’m confused about my own identity,” but doesn’t actually take it there, thank God. That would’ve been tantamount to, “And then I woke up,” and then I would’ve had to hurt somebody.

In Conclusion: The Bad — Inconsistent as hell and too hip for its own good. And what was up with the whole “no one leaves Terminus” thing? If they’re stuck someplace a la The Island or whatnot, it was never established as being relevant to the trouble (Clark’s manic, incoherent exposition notwithstanding).

In Conclusion: The Good — High concept horror is hard to come by, and hell, at least somebody’s going for it. The first segment is a thing of black-hearted beauty. The second is mixed. The third is largely baffling, but peppered with moments of glory. It might make more sense in an extended directors’ cut on DVD, and there’s enough terror/survival/suspense being thrown around correctly that it’s worth watching. Also, it gave me nightmares.

So it must’ve been doing something right.