From executive producer Neil Marshall (Dog Soldiers, The Descent) comes a bone-chilling descent into static, sorrow, and sound. Dark Signal is a Welsh horror-thriller that crawls under your skin like a bad frequency — a ghost story for the digital age, where every whisper carries something you were never meant to hear.
The film opens on a fog-swept radio tower perched over the rural valleys of Snowdonia. Inside, a skeleton crew runs the final overnight broadcast of a failing local station. The air is thick with exhaustion, static, and superstition. But when a distress signal — a young girl’s scream — cuts through the transmission, the night shifts from routine to revelation.
At the heart of it all is Megan Price (played by Andrea Riseborough), a single mother working the graveyard shift to keep her life from collapsing. Her quiet sorrow anchors the chaos — a woman haunted not by ghosts, but by guilt. When the broadcast begins relaying what appears to be the voice of a recently murdered girl, Megan realizes that the message isn’t random. It’s personal.
Marshall’s influence is unmistakable. The film’s atmosphere is dense and tactile — wet roads glistening under headlights, shadows trembling against decaying studio walls, radio dials glowing like eyes in the dark. The sound design is its own monster: overlapping signals, distorted whispers, the crackle of phantom breaths in between words. Every noise feels alive — predatory.
The ensemble cast, led by Annes Elwy and Iwan Rheon, brings grounded realism to a story teetering between the supernatural and the psychological. Rheon’s portrayal of a morally compromised DJ gives the film its uneasy edge — his arrogance hiding an almost childlike fear of being heard by something he can’t see.
When the voice on the air begins to respond to them — naming names, predicting deaths — paranoia consumes the crew. The tension builds like feedback in the headphones: unbearable, inescapable. The horror isn’t in what you see, but what you hear — half-whispered words that seem to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.
Director Edward Evers-Swindell (in collaboration with Marshall) crafts an atmosphere steeped in old-school tension. This isn’t jump-scare horror — it’s creeping dread, the kind that grows louder the quieter it gets. The film’s visual language feels almost analog — flickering lights, grainy monitors, and the ghostly beauty of the Welsh highlands at night.
Thematically, Dark Signal explores the seductive danger of technology as conduit. Every broadcast, every frequency, becomes a bridge between the living and the dead — but bridges can be crossed in both directions. By the third act, the line between radio waves and restless spirits dissolves entirely.
The climax unfolds in chilling brilliance. As the studio loses power, the surviving characters must broadcast one final message to silence the spirit. But in doing so, they open the frequency completely — unleashing every voice that’s ever lingered in static. The final transmission is both horrifying and heartbreakingly beautiful — a cacophony of apologies, confessions, and desperate farewells from the dead.
The last shot? The transmitter hums softly in an empty studio, red light glowing. Then, a faint whisper: “We’re still here.”
💬 Film Verdict:
⭐ 4.7/5 (9.4/10) — Atmospheric, relentless, and emotionally charged, “Dark Signal” turns sound into terror. A ghost story for the airwaves — haunting, human, and impossible to turn off. 🎙️👁️
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