Review by Ray Garton

SIGNS
2002
Written, Produced,
and Directed by:
M. Night Shyamalan

Starring:
Mel Gibson - Father Graham Hess
Joaquin Phoenix - Merrill Hess
Cherry Jones - Officer Caroline Paski
Rory Culkin - Morgan Hess
Abigail Breslin - Bo Hess

Graham Hess is no longer a reverend, but people around town still call him "Father." After a terrible personal loss, Hess lost his faith, something that troubles his two kids, Morgan and Bo, and his brother Merrill, who lives with them. When crop circles — those old favorites of UFO buffs and alien conspiracy theorists — show up in the corn field behind Hess's farmhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, Morgan says he thinks God did it. More of the circles show up in locations all over the globe, so many and so suddenly that the story gets wall-to-wall coverage on television. Next thing you know, there are strange lights over hundreds of cities all over the world, and Hess's newfound lack of faith is tested by what appears to be the End of the World.

But the possible End of the World in M. Night Shyamalan's third movie does not occur the way we're used to seeing such cataclysmic events take place in movies. It unfolds the way it would for the great majority of the people around the world — on television. Merrill Hess takes the TV into a closet because he's afraid the children are becoming obsessed with the coverage. But while the children sleep, Merrill himself sits before the screen with dark, sleep-deprived circles under his eyes, mesmerized by the event.

When the aliens finally come, let's hope for their sake they photograph thin, because they're going to be on TV, and that's where you and I will see them. We won't be in the Oval Office with the grim-faced president, or in the Pentagon with a General barking orders to his men. We'll be at home watching it on TV. Until the aliens eat the reception, anyway.

And they eventually do in Signs. The Hesses board themselves up in the house against the aliens outside. But this invasion doesn't play like most of the alien invasions we see in the movies. In fact, it doesn't play like any of them. This isn't an alien invasion movie, it's a horror movie in which an alien invasion takes place. The fun here isn't in seeing big-headed alien monsters or their spaceships, which you don't see much of, anyway — the fun here is getting the popcorn scared out of you. But even the scares aren't typical. We are not frightened so much by what we see, or by what happens, but by what we don't see, and what might happen.

There has been an encouraging trend in horror movies in recent years toward more subtle scares, and away from excess gore and bloodshed. I could be wrong, but I think it started in 1999 with Shyamalan's first movie, The Sixth Sense. In Signs, he takes that trend about as far as it can go.

All the things we would expect to see in a movie like this take place off-screen. Sometimes we hear what's happening, but we don't see it — and that's worse, more unnerving. At one point, we are plunged into darkness and can see nothing, but we hear the sounds of panic. But the silences are the worst. This movie is so quiet, you can hear the credits rolling at the end. Shyamalan makes us strain to listen during those silences, afraid of what we might hear.

The entire film is infused with a sense of dread, which builds with a series of small but odd details. Little Bo thinks there's something wrong with the drinking water; the family dog behaves menacingly; a baby monitor picks up creepy sounds; something only glimpsed moves around in the corn. And then there are those news broadcasts, with newscasters who sound confused and frightened. Oh, yes, and there are the aliens, of course. But the aliens are not really the horror in this horror movie.

Shyamalan is often compared to Steven Spielberg, and I can see that. There are similarities — for example, like Spielberg, he certainly knows how to draw great performances from child actors, and how to use children effectively in his movies. But I think a more accurate comparison, particularly in the case of Signs, would be to Alfred Hitchcock. Like the master of suspense, Shyamalan enjoys making his audience suffer. He makes appearances in his movies, as Hitchcock did. (However, Hitchcock was wise enough to make his cameos blink-and-you-miss-them brief. In Signs, Shyamalan gives himself a small but important role that might have been more effective in the hands of a skilled actor. For all his talent as a director — and that's considerable — Shyamalan is no actor, and might want to leave that to others in his movies from now on.) And like Hitchcock, Shyamalan knows the value of the McGuffin.

The McGuffin is an incidental device that drives the logic of the plot and the suspense of a film. Hitchcock said it could be ignored as soon as it served its purpose. A good example of a Hitchcock McGuffin is the mistaken identity that takes place at the beginning of North By Northwest. It exists only to get the ball rolling, and once it occurs, we can forget about it, because all that remains is all that's important in the movie — suspense and action.

In Signs, the alien invasion is the McGuffin. It serves to set into motion a series of events that tightens the noose around our neck as we watch. Some may argue with me about this, but if you doubt for a moment that the invasion is a McGuffin, note the utter lack of explanation and payoff at the end, and you will realize just how incidental it is to the movie. The real horror here is not monsters from outer space, but the sinkingly familiar, increasingly claustrophobic feeling of sitting at home watching, powerless, as the world changes rapidly before our eyes on television. It happens to us every day of our lives whether we realize it or not, but it happened most significantly only last year when we watched in horror as the Twin Towers collapsed into rubble, as the magnitude of what had happened seeped into our minds. It happens again in Signs, and it's captured vividly, with fear and dread.

It is the matter of Hess's lost faith that makes the movie limp along at times. Somehow, the subplot clashes with the rest of the movie and never quite fits. We are given the feeling that somehow these two stories — the alien invasion and Hess's loss of faith — are going to collide and produce some kind of result. But that never happens. What does happen is kind of a square peg in a round hole in the movie. It's not a deal-breaker — it doesn't ruin the movie by any means. But it never gels the way it should have. It seems to me that an invasion of space aliens should cause people of faith to start asking some serious questions about their beliefs. That is never addressed in a movie that wants us to take its religious subplot — or, as George W. Bush might say, its faith-based subplot — seriously.

But in the end, all that matters in Signs is fear and dread and suspense, and they are served up with great style, and with an impressive amount of restraint. It's that restraint that gives the movie its power. I hope other filmmakers in the genre will take a few notes. It would be nice to see this trend continue.

[Out of a possible four Bloodshot Eyeballs.]