White Noise (2020 film)

• Richard B. Spencer, a white nationalist. Spencer worries that he will be blamed for further violence after the 2017 Unite the Right rally.[2]
• Mike Cernovich, a men's rights activist and conspiracy theorist. Cernovich attempts to find a marketable opening in the movement and admits that he has no clear agenda.[3]
• Lauren Southern, an anti-feminism and anti-immigration activist on YouTube. She reveals her issues with misogyny and sexism in the alt-right.[2]

White Noise is the first full-length documentary produced by The Atlantic. Daniel Lombroso, the director, focused on the alt-right after the 2016 United States presidential election. One of his interests was answering the question, "What made white-power ideology so intoxicating, especially among my generation?"[4] Part of his interest in the topic came from having grandparents who survived of the Holocaust.[4] Lombroso proposed documentary coverage about the alt-right movement to The Atlantic. After the Unite the Right rally, a full-length documentary was green-lit, and Lombroso said he worked "almost exclusively" on White Noise after 2017. Lombroso had done prior documentary shorts on the alt-right, which he used to build further connections to alt-right activists. Lombroso focused on the three people he identified as the most influential, then persistently worked to get revealing interviews with them.[5]

White Noise premiered at AFI Docs on June 20, 2020.[4] IndieWire highlighted it as one of the 10 most interesting films in the line-up.[6] The film had its international premiere at IDFA in November 2020.[7]

Writing for Variety Owen Gleiberman called White Noise a "lively and disturbing documentary" that exposes alt-right celebrities as "deeply shallow and self-deluded hypocrites".[2] Frank Scheck of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the film "sheds a much-needed spotlight" on its subjects, but the focus comes at the expense of being more informative about the wider alt-right movement.[3] Chris Barsanti of The Playlist gave the film an "A", saying that it "reveals the grift behind the genocidal rhetoric" of the alt-right.[8] Peter Keough of The Boston Globe called the film "fascinating, outrageous, and disturbing."[9] Eric Kohn of IndieWire wrote, "Lombroso has made the scariest documentary of the year without telling us anything new."[10] In an interview with the director, Vox's chief film critic Alissa Wilkinson said that the film is "excellent"[11] and "far more engaging and smart than most journalistic profiles of each of these people."[12]

On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 29 reviews. The site's critics' consensus reads: "White Noise pulls back the curtain on the morbidly fascinating -- and chillingly mundane -- private lives of far-right figureheads."[13] On Metacritic, the film holds a 77% percent score, signifying "favorable reviews."[14]

White Noise was named one of the top documentaries of 2020 by Vox and The Boston Globe.[15][16]

• White Noise at IMDb
• White Noise at Rotten Tomatoes