(There are Spoilers) The movie "Nightwaves" story-line is just too unlikely and convoluted to be taken seriously. We have this couple who are engaged in a violent domestic dispute thats picked up and recored corded by magazine writer Shelby Naylor, Sherilyn Fenn, on her, or her late husbands Peter (Kevin Jubinville), state-of-the-are scanner system.
Shelby who's laid up at home from a traffic accident that killed her husband Peter at the beginning of the movie becomes fascinated with what she picks up on her scanner and becomes a news and voyeur freak. Listening in on police radio reports and even cell and home phone conversations of her neighbors. One of them is Shelby's next-door neighbors the Birkwell's David & Brenda, David Nerman & Emma Campball, who seem to be at it every day and night.
It later turns out that Brenda is missing and Shelby feeling that it's her duty, as a law abiding citizen, to get in touch with the Boston D.A office and turn over the tapes she made of the Birkwell spats which leads to David's arrest in his wife's disappearance. Later finding the headless body of a woman in a nearby dumpster the police pathologist positively identifies her as the missing Brenda Birkwell which has David now facing a first degree murder charger in his wife's death.
Up to this point the made-for-TV movie "Nightwaves" holds your interest but as it reveals the truth about Brenda's death and what, if anything, her husband David had to do with it it really goes too far in trying to be either too cute or brainy and falls completely apart. There's this mysterious and creepy looking guy, who for some strange reason reminds me of Senator John Kerry, Tom Williams ,Bruce Dinsmore, popping up all over the place. Tom somehow knows a lot more then he's leading Shelby on to makes you wonder if he has any idea of what he's supposed to be doing in the movie.
It turns out that Tom, who's a good friend of both Shelby and her late husband Peter, was somehow involved with the Birkwell's in a 5 million dollar insurance policy with David as the beneficiary if his wife Brenda dies or is killed or murdered. The movie goes to pot with it going in so many different directions that by the time it's over you have no idea to just what happened in regards to Brenda's deaths, incredibly she died twice in the movie. Even poor and dead Peter is dug out of his gave, via an audio tape, to give testimony in the David Birkwell murder case.
Trying not to give too much away in the movie's plot it seems that David was a lot more active in his love life then Brenda thought he was and it wasn't with her. Shelby starts to realize that David was not responsible in Brenda's death but it seems too late to save him from being convicted for first degree murder. Even more puzzling is why David doesn't want the one person, which happens not to be Shelby, who can prove him to be innocent in his wife's death to be call as a witness in his defense?
The final ten or so minutes in "Nightwaves" is just too much to take with so many loose ends being uncovered and presented instead as solid evidence. You begin to wonder if your not somehow hallucinating from unknowingly breathing in some bad grass at the office birthday party or just too mind numb and tired, from a hard days work, to be able see and think normally.
