The Signal has two perspectives. Spoiler!

"The Signal" is ...? Literally - It leads three college students to a deserted shack in the desert... and it leads advanced alien life to Earth. Hence the movie's two perspectives in which humans are experimented on. The assumed perspective of the three students leaves many viewers wondering what they are watching. Consider though the perspective of Damon/Nomad - fully revealed at the end - and you will watch this film again and again.

Adding the two perspectives together relays a movie you will watch several times as the pieces fall more and more into place each time.

Nomad's perspective is simple. Following the broadcast transmissions from early radio, then tv, aliens happen upon Earth around the late 70's. Nomad is tasked with learning all about humans, how our bodies work, how we think, and how we choose the actions our bodies will take based on our thoughts. Not the planet - but the sentient life it has evolved is what the aliens focus on as they adapt their cybernetic technology to human hosts, searching for a way to do so that doesn't lead to madness, especially homicidal psychosis - a stickler given the instinctual homicidal fear humans tend to display to the idea, much less the presence of, extraterrestrial life.

Nomad has to experiment, without the subjects knowing they are in an experiment, as simply being aware of such will corrupt any outcomes. The technology must be accepted willingly but without any pretense of a superman complex and the inevitable god complex and destructive use of such power by the recipient. The movie is a defecto "video journal" of such experiments involving three young humans who have their memories repeatedly wiped, are manipulated into situations, and as well, the current state of other humans who have been experimented on for years prior whose minds and bodies have reached their breaking point.

When you watch the movie with both perspectives lapping over each other - you realize each and every scene the three are in - is carefully planned and orchestrated in the hopes of finding what scenarios and the responses to them will eventually lead to the final scenario considered a "success" as seen at the end.

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