Signs

M. Night Shyamalan will always be remembered for The Sixth Sense, and I think all his other movies have been unfairly compared to that breakout film. The Sixth Sense certainly wasn’t his first film (I think it might have been his third), but the twist ending made it so damn popular that all of Shyamalan’s movies since then have met with high audience expectations. Unbreakable, his follow-up to The Sixth Sense, was roundly rejected, though I thought it was spectacular—and then he made his small-scale alien movie Signs.

Signs was the second DVD I ever owned (the first being The Bourne Identity), and I have to say, this is a movie that grows on you. At first I felt it was too small-scale, as it deals solely with an individual family’s struggle for survival during an alien invasion, and wasn’t the big epic that War of the Worlds (the original) or Independence Day were. Signs was simply about one family in their tiny community, irrespective of the rest of the world, and when the climactic alien invasion comes, it only shows that one family in their house trying to outrun and outmaneuver the aliens.

For the longest time, I didn’t find Mel Gibson believable as the fallen priest who’s still trying to deal with his wife’s death. I say that because, up to then, Mel Gibson had largely been typecast in my mind—not as Mad Max, but as Martin Riggs from the Lethal Weapon franchise. After 4 movies of that, as well as Bird on a Wire, it’s hard to get the ‘80s Mel out of your mind. I never saw Braveheart, nor Passion of the Christ, though I’d seen enough of Mel to know that he could be a serious, dramatic actor when he needed to be. And most times I thought he did it quite well! But as a priest . . . this role just had to grow on me. I did like Joaquin Phoenix as Mel’s younger brother, even though the age difference between the two actors kinda necessitated a suspension of belief.

If anything was proven by Signs, it’s that Shyamalan is a spectacular psychological story-teller. All of the scariest moments in the film are either when the screen is dark and you only hear the activity inside the blank screen, or when you’re hearing activity off in the distance, like when the family listens to the dog dying from the inside of the house, or when Mel is walking through the corn stalks at night and he hears the clicking of the aliens jarringly close by, or when Joaquin accidentally slaps the basement light with an axe, thrusting the room into darkness, and you hear them frantically rustling to barricade the basement door. When fear is left purely to the imagination, it works 100 times better than seeing the blood and guts and gore in front of you. Shyamalan clearly knows this, and utilizes it to full effect—not just in Signs, but in all of his movies. There’s a moment where Joaquin Phoenix finds a radio in the basement, turns it on and starts tuning through all the stations, finding nothing but white noise, and he says, “What’s happening out there?” Just trying to imagine what is happening out there, each audience member comes up with horrific scenes of their own, filling in their own blanks. And again, it works so much better than actually seeing what happens in the outside world.

Shyamalan also knows how to evoke very powerful emotions from moments that, in real life, would be utterly unbearable. The dinner/“last meal” scene, where everyone begins to break down and cry . . . this scene guts me every time I see it. Everyone’s emotions are so high, because alien crafts are hovering in 300-400 cities around the world, all within a mile of crop circles (such as the ones Mel and his children found in their fields at the start of the movie), everyone faced with the unknown—and the very real possibility of their own death.

How can facts like these be ignored when gathering around the dinner table? They all fear that it’s their last meal, and it’s truly heartbreaking when Mel, unable to control his fear any longer, starts lashing out at his children, then loses all composure and starts to cry himself while trying to eat. You can feel his sense of strength fall away like melting glacial ice, and when his children come to him to hug and forgive him almost immediately afterward . . . if it weren’t for Mel’s reaching out and grabbing Joaquin’s shoulder and pulling him over to the rest of the group hug, I wouldn’t be able to bear watching this scene. It really does pierce right into you with its raw emotion, and that little dose of humor amidst a moment that can only come between brothers serves as the scene’s saving grace (at least for me).

Signs didn’t have the customary Shyamalan twist at the end, which I was grateful for. While it worked perfectly in The Sixth Sense, the twist in Unbreakable really didn’t, even though the story benefited from it. And in Signs, you didn’t even need a twist; the story worked out perfectly on its own.

I have to wonder if Shyamalan was trying to teach a lesson in faith and in the power of belief through this movie—not faith and belief in God, but faith and belief in life, in ourselves, in the power and mystery of life, bringing us the most unexpected surprises, connecting random moments in the most sensible and logical ways. Like the last words of Mel’s wife before she died, or of Rory Culkin’s asthma at the very end. Everything, in the words of the director himself during his cameo, “was meant to be”.

I give this a 7 out of 10, ranking this in my top three favorite Shyamalan films, with Unbreakable being my favorite and The Sixth Sense holding third place. (And as a side note to Shyamalan, you may want to research the Catholic faith a little more next time, because the last I checked, Catholic priests don’t marry and have families.)