The Signal

Although this ingenious sci-fi horror hybrid never quite delivers a story as dazzling as its visuals, its ambitions set it apart in an age of carbon-copy superhero movies. Starting slowly in the guise of an innocuous road movie, it finds three tech-savvy students - Nic (Brenton Thwaites), his girlfriend Haley (Olivia Cooke) and best friend Jonah (Beau Knapp) - taking a detour from a cross-country jaunt to follow a mysterious signal that they think will lead them to a computer genius who has been hacking into their college servers. But when they arrive at a decrepit shack in the desert wilderness, things turn sinister. It would be unfair to reveal what happens next, but what promises to be a cerebral Matrix-style spectacular comes sadly unstuck with a puzzling, overcomplicated finale. This is more about the journey than the destination which, like Cabin in the Woods, is a genre-mashing ride that uses shock and surprise to shift things up a gear.