An architect (Michael Keaton) who loses his novelist wife (Chandra West) in an apparent accident is contacted by a stranger (Ian McNeice) who claims to have heard her through something called Electronic Voice Phenomenonthe means by which the dead allegedly communicate with us via radios, TVs, and computers. The widower becomes as obsessed as the stranger with receiving messages and images from beyond. Though I’m well disposed toward elliptical spook stories that depend on the audience’s imagination for their jolts and effects, it takes art as well as craft to put them across, and Geoffrey Sax’s direction of a Niall Johnson script has neither. Muddled and boring. With Deborah Kara Unger. PG-13, 101 min. (JR)