White Noise (2020 film)


White Noise is a 2020 American documentary film directed by Daniel Lombroso. The film covers three figures in the alt-right movement: Richard B. Spencer, Mike Cernovich, and Lauren Southern.

Interviews

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?" Part of his interest in the topic came from having grandparents who survived of the Holocaust. 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.

Release

White Noise premiered at AFI Docs on June 10, 2020. IndieWire highlighted it as one of the 10 most interesting films in the line-up.

Reception

Writing for Variety Owen Gleiberman called the film a "lively and disturbing documentary" that exposes alt-right celebrities as "deeply shallow and self-deluded hypocrites". 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. Chris Barsanti of The Playlist gave the film an "A," saying that it "reveals the grift behind the genocidal rhetoric" of the alt-right. On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 100% based on 7 reviews, with an average rating of 8.9/10, as of July 31, 2020.