Film · 2022 · Films · 2020s
White Noise
Scored from 338 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 2020s (7,930 peers).
Summary
A college professor who specializes in Hitler studies navigates absurd academic life with his wife and blended family in a Midwestern town. When a nearby train accident releases a toxic chemical cloud, the family is forced to evacuate, and the resulting 'airborne toxic event' awakens deep anxieties about mortality that ripple through their lives.
White Noise is a 2022 comedy, drama and horror film. Inside comedy it is classed as Dark Comedy.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 199 of whom clear the calibration test. The cohort it is ranked inside is 2020s films — 7,930 of them. The calibrated figure is built from 338 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 352 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where White Noise lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 2020s (7,930 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 338.
Cohort: Films · 2020s
