Disney / Buena Vista
After the cultural phenomenon that was The Sixth Sense, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan followed it up with Unbreakable: a movie which is startling in its depiction of barely controlled emotion, and represented a true leap forward in visual storytelling from the director.
Unfortunately, a somewhat obscure marketing campaign kept the film from finding as large an audience as The Sixth Sense did.
Although the film was critically and commercially successful, it was considered a mild disappointment.
Signs represents a conscious attempt to replicate the “hook” The Sixth Sense had with mainstream audiences.
The crop circle motif, so central in the marketing campaign, was clear and legible to the same people who had wondered what Unbreakable could be about; the emphasis was shifted back from the barely contained rage and sadness of Unbreakable into more traditional modes of Hitchcockian suspense; and most of all, the story deals with a small cast of characters, working on limited knowledge and dealing with a ubiquitous bogeyman of popular culture.
Mel Gibson plays Graham Hess, a widowed farmer and former priest who lives outside Philadelphia with his son, Morgan, daughter, Bo, and his younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix). When crop circles appear in the family cornfield they are at first dismissed as a prank until strange events worldwide make it apparent that they portend a full scale alien invasion.
Signs is famous for two things: a somewhat contrived final twist involving the aliens’ weakness to water, and a complete mastery of how to build suspense by hiding the monster from the audience for absolutely as long as possible. Personally, I can forgive the twist which reads like an homage to Wells’ War of the Worlds, and I’m still in awe of the suspense. Signs is spellbinding by virtue of what it suggests to the audience– movement in a cornfield, clicking noises on a baby monitor, a shaky glimpse on a handheld video camera.
This kind of limitation is enhanced by the fact that unlike something like Independence Day, Signs never gives the viewer a big picture view of the world. There are no cutaway scenes to the White House or some professor’s lab where the basis for the aliens is explained. You’re stuck with these normal people in the Philadelphia suburbs and you don’t know anything but what they know, and it is so chillingly effective that Steven Spielberg borrowed the approach for his version of War of the Worlds nearly a decade later.
Signs also marks the return for Shyamalan to matters of faith which strongly characterized his work before The Sixth Sense. Graham Hess’ arc is one wherein he must recover his faith, and I find it somewhat unsatisfying. Gibson is excellent in the role, giving one of the best performances of his career, but (without spoiling the ending) I find his turn towards the end to be the one weakness of an otherwise perfect script. Hess fell out of faith because of a tragic set of circumstances beyond his control that caused him to experience a devastating loss, and in the natural progression of the arc would be the acquisition of the wisdom that faith isn’t dependent on individual circumstance, but rather Hess experiences the inverse of that situation and recovers his faith. Hess didn’t grow– his circumstances changed.
This is a minor critique for an otherwise excellent thriller with strong tones of Hitchcock and Speilberg’s mixture of technical excellence married to absolutely razor sharp commercial instincts. For three films, Shyamalan positioned himself as a new important voice in American cinema before The Village and Lady in the Water signaled a troubled middle portion to his career which he didn’t recover from until 2015’s The Visit.
This film is highly recommended as a marker of a young filmmaker at the height of his powers. Give it a watch.
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