Noah Baumbach’s White Noise is the cinematic equivalent of being stuck on hold with an insurance company while an existential philosophy professor whispers Don DeLillo quotes into your other ear. Adapted from DeLillo’s “unfilmable” 1985 novel—a label Baumbach boldly accepted as a challenge, then promptly proved accurate—White Noise is a surrealist black comedy that thinks it’s juggling metaphysics, consumerism, and death but mostly ends up dropping the balls and falling into a shopping cart full of expired symbolism.
This is Baumbach’s first Netflix-funded swing at “big cinema,” and you can feel him reaching—desperately, pompously—stretching every scene like it’s made of overpriced taffy. The result is a film that wants to be profound but ends up being profoundly annoying. It’s not so much a story as it is a lecture delivered by a man wearing corduroy pants and a fear of mortality.
Let’s begin with the plot, which is part family comedy, part ecological disaster, part noir thriller, part philosophical treatise, and 100% incomprehensible if you miss a single line of dialogue. Adam Driver plays Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler Studies”—a field so absurd it would be funny if it weren’t delivered with the sincerity of a man writing a dissertation on sandwich wrappers. Jack teaches at a fictional liberal arts college where intellectual elitism oozes out of every hallway like mold, and the lectures have more name-dropping than a David Foster Wallace fan fiction.
Jack is married to Babette (Greta Gerwig, with a frizzed-out perm and a Valium-laced gaze), a woman who teaches posture classes, forgets basic sentences, and may or may not be addicted to an experimental drug called Dylar that’s designed to suppress fear of death. The two share a blended Brady Bunch of precocious, over-articulated children who spend most of their screen time fact-checking the news or interrogating their parents about toxic events and metaphysical dread like junior NPR correspondents.
Their family dinners sound like freshman year philosophy courses.
The film is divided into three parts: the first, a rambling introduction to the Gladney household and the absurdities of academic life; the second, an “airborne toxic event” that forces the family to evacuate and somehow introduces action to a movie that rejects pacing like it’s gluten; and the third, a noir-tinged unraveling of Babette’s secret addiction, which leads to adultery, motel showdowns, and an extended dance sequence at a grocery store that screams “this means something!” but really just says “we had Netflix money.”
Let’s talk tone—if you can find it. Baumbach throws together slapstick, satire, sincerity, absurdism, horror, and sitcom energy like a kid making soup from whatever’s left in the fridge. The result is a tonal gumbo that gives you whiplash. One minute we’re watching a chemical cloud shaped like an evil poodle float over suburbia; the next we’re in a marital crisis that’s supposed to be poignant but feels like a parody of Bergman written during a panic attack.
The performances are intentionally stilted, because White Noise is trying very hard to be literary. Adam Driver gives it his all, mumbling philosophical tirades and walking like a man who’s physically burdened by his own intellect. But even his commitment can’t save Jack from being one of the least relatable protagonists ever committed to film. He’s a professor of genocide who’s afraid of death but doesn’t actually do anything about it—except yell at his wife and get upstaged by his 10-year-old son.
Greta Gerwig’s Babette is barely a person. She mostly exists to stare into the distance, chew on existential questions, and whisper about her prescription drug with the emotional intensity of someone reading IKEA assembly instructions. Their chemistry as a couple is less “tender intimacy” and more “two grad students doing roleplay to avoid divorce.”
The children, who in any other film might be the heart, are instead mouthpieces for DeLillo’s ideas—miniature lecturers who speak in paragraphs, not sentences. You don’t feel for them. You don’t even remember their names. You just want them to stop talking so you can Google what anyone is actually trying to say.
Visually, the film is solid—props to cinematographer Lol Crawley for making 1980s suburban dread look like a Wes Anderson set flooded with microwaves and Reagan-era anxiety. There are beautiful shots of neon-lit gas stations, sterile supermarkets, and endless highways, all hinting at something just under the surface—something important. Too bad the script never bothers to dig.
And the dialogue? Oh god, the dialogue. It’s like DeLillo’s book was chopped into fortune cookies and then shouted through a megaphone made of irony. Everyone talks in abstractions. No one says what they mean. Baumbach seems to believe that the more opaque the sentence, the deeper the meaning. Spoiler alert: this isn’t philosophy—it’s posturing. “All plots move deathward,” one character declares. And sure, that’s true. But here, it just means the audience is begging for the sweet release of credits.
Now, let’s address the climax, if you can call it that. The film builds toward a motel confrontation involving a gun, an experimental drug dealer, and the possibility of redemption—or at least resolution. What it delivers instead is a series of awkwardly choreographed moments that collapse under their own ambition. Jack shoots someone. Babette cries. A nun appears. And somehow, nothing matters. Not the cloud, not the infidelity, not the near-death experiences. Just another trip to the A&P for some cereal and nihilism.
Then, as if to say, “Wait, we’re still clever,” Baumbach throws in a final dance sequence set in a supermarket, choreographed to LCD Soundsystem’s “New Body Rhumba.” It’s beautifully lit, well-shot, and utterly meaningless. Characters dance with joy they haven’t earned, in a setting that’s been used as a stand-in for soulless consumerism the entire film. It’s like putting a disco ball in a mausoleum and calling it catharsis.
Final verdict? White Noise is Baumbach’s overcooked love letter to postmodernism—dense, disjointed, and ultimately empty. It’s a film that confuses complexity for depth, pretension for insight, and absurdity for humor. Watch it only if you’re writing a thesis on literary adaptation, or if you’ve ever shouted “Death is a construct!” during a dinner party and meant it.
Otherwise, just go stare at a microwave for two hours. You’ll get the same effect—and at least it ends with a beep.
