Noah Baumbach delivers doomsday

The director known for drama amps things up to cataclysmic in ‘White Noise.’

If you were looking for a director to stage a spectacular cataclysm onscreen, Noah Baumbach would probably not be on your short list.

Baumbach’s sharply observed, often personal movies, including 2005’s “The Squid and the Whale,” 2014’s “While We’re Young” and 2019’s best picture-nominated “Marriage Story,” have featured plenty of relationship disasters and emotional blow-ups. But there have been no actual explosions, no big car crashes, no visual effects.

“We had to deal with blood a little bit in ‘Marriage Story,’ ” Baumbach says dryly, referring to a scene in which Adam Driver’s character accidentally cuts himself while attempting to perform a knife trick. “But that’s about it.”

So when Baumbach was preparing to adapt author Don DeLillo’s seminal 1985 postmodern novel “White Noise,” he knew one of the biggest challenges would be filming the book’s dramatic centerpiece: a mysterious

Wilson Webb Netf lix GRETA GERWIG, left, May Nivola, Adam Driver, Samuel Nivola and Raffey Cassidy in “White Noise.”