White Noise
Cert: 15 | ★★★★✩

Famed for his quirky and often very relatable East Coast dramedies, Jewish filmmaker

White Noise credit Netflix

Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig plus brood on the run (Netflix)

has often mined his own experiences to deliver some of his best work.

His last film, Marriage Story, a frighteningly accurate depiction of a couple’s divorce, earned the Brooklyn-born filmmaker six Oscar nods, and netted a Best Supporting Actress win for Laura Dern.

Adapted from Don DeLillo’s era-defining 1985 novel of the same name, White Noise is Baumbach’s 11th narrative feature and the first not to be based on an original story of his own.

Featuring another tour de force turn from Marriage Story star Adam Driver, the film digs deep into our collective fears and anxieties while drawing parallels between the author’s apocalyptic vision of 1980s intellectual discourse and the post-Covid world we live in.

Driver plays Jack Gladney, a schlubby middle-aged professor of Hitler Studies at the College-on-the-Hill who is married to the troubled and often absent-minded Babette (Greta Gerwig).

They have a noisy menagerie of children from previous relationships and one child of their own. When a dangerous chemical spill threatens the life of the campus and its neighbouring town, the family is urged to evacuate or risk certain death.

Bookended by heavily choreographed and vividly coloured sequences, White Noise feels almost like a Jacques Demy musical.

Baumbach delivers an assured adaptation of DeLillo’s novel in this intricately constructed period piece. His attention to detail, coupled with some astute deadpan deliveries from Driver and Gerwig, feels otherworldly yet contemporary.

And while he presents the Gladneys as infuriatingly verbose and constantly introspective, somehow he still manages to make us care about and root for them.

Although his film lives in a heightened reality where people speak in riddles and are maybe just a bit too open about their anxieties and fear of dying, Baumbach’s film still feels like the truest representation yet of what we’ve collectively been through over the last three years.

Fans of Baumbach’s earlier work might find his latest a lot harder to stomach, but White Noise does feel challenging and inspired. In departing from his comfort zone of neurotic, yet very relatable characters — think The Meyerowitz Stories or The Squid and the Whale — Baumbach has managed to deliver something rather special here.