M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” is the work of a master craftsman. His ability to create suspense out of the most innocuous situations and without reliance on heavy special effects, as is so common today in Hollywood, forces comparison to Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense. It is an indication of how masterly Shyamalan understands his craft.
At its core “Signs” is not a story about extraterrestrials and the signs they leave, it is a story about faith, and the loss thereof. But more of that later.
Mel Gibson has made a name for himself in recent years, acting in movies that defy the usual liberal biases of Hollywood. Various gay rights groups roundly condemned “Braveheart” for the gratuitous death of a homosexual being tossed from a window (the world’s first hate crime?). In “The Patriot” he encourages his two underage sons to pick up firearms against the English. Children using firearms, the nerve of it! Gibson can be happy not to have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court. In “We Were Soldiers” Gibson played a caring, deeply religious battalion commander who valiantly led his disciplined soldiers to victory in Vietnam.
Didn’t he know that all commanders in Vietnam resembled Gen. Jack D. Ripper from “Dr. Strangelove” and were solely obsessed with body counts, and that all soldiers were drug-addled societal misfits? And as we all have been made aware in dozens of Hollywood movies about the military, soldiers don’t pray with their families, they beat them (as in, for example, “American Beauty”). Now Gibson dares to star in a movie that seriously deals with the question of faith and predestination.
Gibson stars as Graham Hess, a farmer in Bucks County, Pa. Six months earlier he was a priest as well, but left his vocation after the death of his wife in a car accident caused by neighbor Ray Reddy (Shyamalan himself). He lives on his farm with his two children Morgan and Bo (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin), as well as his brother Merrill, who moved in to help Graham cope with his loss.
Graham discovers crop circles in his field and thinks they were caused by mischievous neighbors, but slowly comes to the realization that something more sinister is at work on his land.
Indeed, the movie points out that crop circles have been previously uncovered as elaborate hoaxes (more than 90 percent of crop circles were created in southeastern England by two bored farmers), but these crop circles are somewhat different and have popped up simultaneously all over the globe.
“There are two types of people in the world,” Graham explains to his brother, differentiating between those that believe that there is a greater purpose behind everything that happens and those that think that all events unfold at random. He leaves no doubt that he belongs to that second group, since he is unable to understand how God could have let his wife die in such a tragic manner.
The increases in signs of the presence of aliens raises the suspense level as it is unveiled through shadows in the night outside the farm, and TV news broadcasts of frightened news anchors.
When a home video shot during a birthday party reveals a glimpse of an alien, the worst fears of a possible alien invasion are confirmed.
As members of the Hess family barricade themselves in their home and rely solely on sporadic news broadcasts to get an update on current events, one cannot help but be reminded of the claustrophobic, end-of-the- world atmosphere in John Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead.”
It speaks much of Shyamalan’s skill that one of the most frightening scenes occurs as Morgan is suffering an asthma attack and Graham is trying to calm him down, desperately attempting to keep him alive.
And of course it wouldn’t be a Shyamalan movie without a surprise finish. The master of trick endings, which he employed to great effect in “The Sixth Sense” (1999), and again in “Unbreakable” (2000), delivers again with an ending that ties in several seemingly unimportant details and provides a deeply spiritual answer to the importance of faith.
It is Shyamalan’s ability to turn a seemingly straightforward horror movie into a deeply religious story, without the hokeyness usually reserved for faith in Hollywood, that sets this movie apart from the usual Hollywood summer fare.
However, Shyamalan’s fame for trick endings is somewhat undermining his ability to deliver them. While never revealing his final twists until the very end, anticipation of it reduces the surprise when it does happen.
Because of that, it will be difficult for any of his movies to top the ending of “The Sixth Sense.” This does not detract from the quality of “Signs.” And with the director at age 31 with already five written and directed movies having acquired a reputation of a “boy-genius,” we can probably look forward to many more of his ambitiously well-crafted plots and grand storytelling movies.
Hans-Marc Hurd is an editorial intern of Carolina Journal, monthly newspaper of the John Locke Foundation.