Review: Signs (2002)

After 20 years, M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs is still a successful supernatural thriller. Yet, the shifting landscape of Hollywood and blockbuster filmmaking has sharpened my recognition of which aspects are its particular strengths. Signs offers plenty of good jump scares and creepy scenes of people running through corn fields at night. But it is in the human relationships, anchored in emotional resonance over compelling logic, where the film really shines.

It may be hard to remember, but when Signs came out in 2002, Mel Gibson was still one of Hollywood’s top leading men, and it is easy to see why in this film. Few actors combined a credible down-to-earth masculinity with a broad and authentic-seeming emotional range. He could do action films as easily as he could star in a blockbuster romantic comedy, such as 2000’s What Women Want. Part of this is because Gibson was always adept at portraying the emotional life of his characters. Consider the anguish and angst of Lethal Weapon’s Martin Riggs. That emotional vulnerability can, perhaps, be linked to the later emotional volatility that has contributed to the damage to Gibson’s reputation in recent years, but in 2002, and in the figure of Father Graham Hess in Signs, it works amazingly well.

While ostensibly about an invasion of Earth by hostile aliens who leave messages via crop circles around the world, Signs is really about the way that we process the world around us symbolically. It’s about interpretation. It centres its plot very narrowly on the Hess family, in the wake of their grieving the loss of Graham’s wife, Colleen, in a car accident. Living on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, 40 miles outside of director Shyamalan’s hometown of Philadelphia, with his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), asthmatic son, Morgan (Rory Culkin), and small daughter, Bo (Abigail Breslin), Graham has abandoned his faith, left the clergy, and blames God for taking his wife. When mysterious crop circles begin to appear in their corn field and shadowy visitors are seen around the farm at night, it slowly becomes clear that the phenomena are linked to related incidents occurring around the globe.

Shyamalan however isn’t interested so much in the global story. Expository information is doled out to the viewer through news footage, in a manner akin to many 90s disaster movies. But information also comes from conversations with the local sheriff (Cherry Jones) and Ray Reddy, the man who was responsible for accidentally killing Graham’s wife, who is played by the director himself in the largest role he had yet granted himself. The tragedy of the night of Colleen’s death, slowly revealed through flashbacks, is the emotional heart of the film, and Shyamalan makes it key to the film’s climactic showdown with the aliens. Some won’t find this emotional linkage, rather than logical linkage, compelling, but it is explicated in a late night conversation between Graham and Merrill, in which he lays out a dichotomy. Graham says to Merrill, “See, what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way. Is it possible that there are no coincidences?” It’s pretty obvious which one Shyamalan is.

Through his first three breakout films—The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and then Signs—the director’s aforementioned cameos serve as merely one reason to compare him to Hitchcock. Also, like Hitchcock, Shyamalan revels in amping up tension and suspense, playing his audience’s emotions “like a piano,” as Hitchock described his own command of the audience. In Signs, James Newton Howard’s score in this film is doing heavy lifting in Bernard Hermann mode, further inviting the comparison. But unlike Hitchcock, whose films have a ruthless coldness in spite of their emotional truths, Shyamalan is as much a sentimentalist as any major filmmaker of the last few decades. Signs doesn’t make a lot of sense when you think a bit too much about some of the plot, but if you go on the ride with the characters, and allow yourself to feel their emotions in the situation, it works wonderfully.

Shyamalan consistently shows a knack for anchoring scares and thrills around the performances of his actors, which lend those scenes a more visceral impact than they might in another thriller. While Signs ultimately is more focused on emotionally satisfying its audience than on traditional thrills and scares, it should be said that the film has some genuinely creepy and scary scenes. In addition to the performances, the framing and camera movement, which often limits our perspective due to tall corn stalks or the enclosed space of a farmhouse, likewise contribute to the film’s effectiveness as a thriller. Few scenes in movies have offered as much surprise for as little revelation as when Graham drops his flashlight while running in the cornfield, only to see a flash of green alien leg disappear into the crops as he refocuses his light. Add to this effective sound design that subtly enhances the mood via the creaks of the rooftops in the farmhouse or the rustling of leaves and you’ve got several standout scenes of nighttime creepiness.

Let’s consider two standout scenes that both reveal how Shyamalan manages to use actor performances, careful editing, and emotional reactions to heighten the effectiveness of scenes. The first is perhaps the film’s best jump scare, where Merrill has been watching the television footage of the dawning alien invasion while holed up in a farmhouse closet. The newscaster primes the audience that the following footage of an alien revealing itself during a Brazilian birthday party may be particularly “shocking” and “disturbing.” We cut back and forth between the television’s shaky footage of the alien and Merrill’s horrified reaction; Joaquin Phoenix uses both body language and facial expressions, inviting us to mirror his reaction to the footage. I remember in the theatre finding the entire sequence unbearably suspenseful. Rewatching it years later, it’s still creepy, but knowing what’s coming, I’m more impressed with Phoenix’s performance and Shyamalan’s ability to use it to coax shock and horror from the audience.

The second scene is the emotional heart of the film, when, in flashback, we witness Graham’s final moments with his wife as she lies dying, pinned to a tree in the car crash. Mel Gibson’s performance is thoroughly believable and heartbreaking as we watch the dawning realization on his face that he's going to lose his wife. He chokes back tears, trying to maintain his composure, as he goes to speak with her one last time. Gibson manages somehow to portray barely contained shock and grief in his performance. His credibility is key to Shyamalan’s plot conceit that Colleen’s last words will contain the key to defeating the aliens, something that is as contrived as it comes, but is granted an emotional resonance and gravity in Gibson’s performance. That memory of Graham’s, one that he revisits day after day, is transformed in significance and yet loses none of its weight.

Signs works best in such individual sequences, which play to our emotional responses to loss, to faith, to the horror of creepy things that go bump in the night or something half glimpsed in the dark. And that’s enough for the film to be a success. There’s a reason why audiences responded to Shyamalan’s film, and it wasn’t the fact that the film was about aliens and crop circles.

It’s a shame that Shyamalan became pigeon-holed as the “twist” guy. True, Signs has an ending that brings together the various threads woven throughout the film, but unlike The Sixth Sense, it doesn’t really force us to re-evaluate what we thought we knew. It’s not a puzzle, nor is it a mystery. It’s a refocusing, a re-interpretation of what came before. If you don’t buy the re-interpretation, then the film won’t work as well for you. I suspect that studios, and perhaps Shyamalan himself, became convinced that it was his plots and knack for wild twists that made him so successful in the first years of the 20th century. And he does have a willingness to go for the really daring idea, as he showed in more recent films like Split and Glass. 

But for me, Shyamalan’s first few major features, from The Sixth Sense through The Village (another much maligned film that I will revisit in the next couple years), are best understood as character studies, all having excellent performances that carry their Twilight Zone-esque plots through to the finish. Perhaps Signs is a bit silly in having aliens who are defeated by cups of water coming to a planet that’s 70% water, but it doesn’t really matter: “What you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, sees miracles?” If you do, then this film will still work for you.

8 out of 10

Signs (2002, USA)

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan; starring Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin, Cherry Jones, M. Night Shyamalan.

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