The film Noise features social media influencer Matthias Johan Leysen and his wife, Liv, who is a baker. They shift to Matthias’ childhood home in rural Belgium with their baby Julius. The film starts with a death, giving us the necessary sinister feeling about how the film is going to take shape and journeys forward to a couple of years down the line in the future when Matthias settles in with his family in his childhood home. The childhood rural mansion of Matthias is close to an abandoned factory which Matthias’s father, Pol, had a history with. The young couple moved to a rural setting for peace and quiet, but their baby does not provide them with the calm and quiet environment that they desired. The supernatural feeling gets established from the very beginning of the film, and even in the moments that are happy and joyful, the psychologically sinister feeling never stops working on the audience’s psyche. The story focuses on how the noise of the baby among the tranquility almost drove Matthias to paranoia and pushed him to the psychological edges that were beyond his control.
Spoilers Ahead
‘Noise’ Story
Matthias is a social media influencer by profession, and in order to portray himself as an ideal parent, he takes care of the baby at night while Liv sleeps unbothered by the cries. However, the noise very soon started to get to him, especially when he decided to solve the local chemical factory’s mystery, which involved his father as well. Pol lives in a retirement home and has memory problems that seem to be the result of old age, but their roots are far deeper than anticipated, and it unfolds through the story gradually. When Matthias decided to solve the mystery of the local factory, he also happened to spend more time with his father, which worked well for Pol. Meanwhile, Liv tries to establish her catering business and roams around the village, where she finds that people are not very welcoming. She was welcomed at a local organic shop where the owner was best friends with Matthias’ mother, Michelle.
Both Liv and Matthias have different experiences as parents; Matthias was having a hard time dealing with the baby’s crying noises, whereas Liv used to take the baby out on the stroller for walks and whatnot. The film brings out the ugliest of emotions of being a parent as it shows how having a baby can be emotionally exhausting and vexing. Initially, in the story, in order to be the ideal parent, Matti comforts his child night after night, but the project of solving the mystery of the factory takes a toll on him and gradually makes him exhausted. The noise of the baby and the stories about factories were emotionally taxing for Matti, and he was pushed towards insomnia and insanity, depicted through demonic images and other ghostly figures.
At one point, the simple combination of sound and notification from the phone with the baby’s crying noise is used for a sequential transition. In another sequence, when Matti is online, he ignores his baby’s cries and focuses on his work, which has angry comments on the live feed. We do not get to see the professions of the couple in detail in one sequence, as one of the outbursts have Matti screaming that he earns more than Liv, who is simply a baker and was not given enough respect for his job. The argument breaks out between them based on their individual professions, and Liv storms off the house. Matti visited the factory a couple of times, and eerie noises followed him based on the stories that he had been reading all night.
In one of the sequences, he is found by Liv’s brother inside the factory, but he hurts Liv’s brother and runs the scene as a depiction of him getting paranoid. When she comes back, she finds Matti breaking a part of the house to make a hole filled with water in an attempt to save the bodies that were dead but not found. In the previous sequence, Matti is shown to have an outburst with his father, who pays attention to the kid instead of Matti, which breaks Matti down, and he storms off to his father’s retirement house with his kid. Matti is soon followed by Liv, and Pol mistakes Liv for his wife Michelle, and then we get to the bottom of the story about the death of Michelle and why noise bothered Matthias so much. Michelle had made a suicide attempt with her baby, but Pol could only save the child and not Michelle, and because of that she has lived with the guilt forever. In the climax, when Matthias was digging up the hole in an attempt to find the unfound dead bodies, seeing his condition, Liv jumped into the hole without thinking twice, and both got saved by Pol, who had followed Liv to the house.
‘Noise’ Ending Explained – What Happens In The End?
The couple gets saved in the end, and that is where the film also ends. The film is filled with enough themes like paternal and maternal discord, clichés surrounding haunted houses, shocking and mysterious secrets, and tense investigations, all set to an eerie and sinister background score. The film tries to tackle a lot of issues, having a major psychological impact on the audiences but fails to achieve any success as none of the narratives get cleared, and it ends abruptly.
With such an abrupt end, the film fails to achieve the admiration of audiences, and they are kept hanging for more answers as the film deals with all the mentioned themes very clumsily and without any depth. The narrative is a mixture of ideas that are thrown all together but not enough to form a stable, logical narrative. “Noise” fails to put forward any of the narratives that it tries to tackle, and that’s where the film limits itself. There are lots of questions kept in the end: was Pol finally out of the guilt? Did Matthias get better? What happened to the local factory? Etcetera. There are many questions left in audiences’ minds that are not answered.