Close Encounters of The Fourth Sign

First he brought you “The Sixth Sense”, then he brought you a movie that, some said, had very little sense at all, the Bruce Willis vehicle, “Unbreakable”. Now, the man with the name worth six thousand points at Scrabble, M. Night Shyamalan, brings you his claustrophobic view of intergalactic communication and conflict in “Signs”.

Well, my partner and I went to the movies to check this out last night. The trailers looked reasonably compelling – but then, that fooled us the last time. Not knowing entirely what to expect – the only way to really appreciate a movie, these days, I find - we settled down in Lowestoft’s comfortably busy cinema… and let a hugely entertaining movie absorb us.

The film is filled with these small “signs” for the audience… delicate, but linked pointers that slowly take us toward the inevitable conclusion. The family dog pees on itself, before rounding on the children. Hess and his brother, Merrill (a brilliant performance by Joaquin Phoenix), who lives with his brother’s family, we assume, to help out in the absence of the children’s mother, give chase to an unseen, but superbly athletic intruder. This scene, and the succeeding frame where the two brothers attempt to give a statement to the police, demonstrates the two male lead characters perfectly. Merrill is the more affected, laconic, worldly-wise (in fact, other-worldly-wise!), of the two, slightly in awe of his older brother. Graham is the loving, but somewhat emotionally bloodied and spiritually broken, more forthright of the two. This relationship is extremely believable throughout the movie, and the chemistry between the two, brotherly bickering and brotherly love is immensely enjoyable to watch. There is much humour here, in an, at times, beautifully scripted plot.

Cleverly, the audience is as isolated as the family. We are never given cinematic footage of the trouble in the rest of the world, so we have no frame of reference to the broader troubles that the family themselves do not have… Like them, we rely on patchy reports on their radio; glimpses of lights in the sky on the TV news; the sinister disappearance of the lights… but the solidity of the craft in the air, (or is this just more of the movie’s paranoia?) given their apparent extraction. There are no sweeping shots of galactic battles, a la “Independence Day”. Hess and his family come to rely on a single book… the kind we all deride as ridiculous fancy, written by a pseudo-professor named “Bimbu”, for clues on how to protect themselves in the coming days.

It is not giving too much away (and I am desperately trying to give nothing away, folks, it will really spoil things if you know more than a scant few facts about this film. I have already seen one review that told me the alien’s weakness… which certainly took the edge of some of my viewing pleasure… grrr!), to tell you that Gibson’s character is a widower, nor that his wife was killed by a truck… the driver of which is still in town. This is a small, but compelling cameo by Shyamalan himself… much improved on his egotistical irrelevance in “Unbreakable”. Here, he comes up with the goods… His parting shot to Gibson’s character before he heads to the hills “Oh, and don’t look in my pantry, Father. I found one of them in there and trapped him inside”, will put the hair up on the back of your neck.

Similarly, the children project themselves admirably. There is no Spielberg slush here; the children are troubled, and troubling… often at loggerheads with their father. Rory Culkin’s rendition of Morgan, is touching – and cancels out my first silent thought “Christ! Another bloody Culkin!” – but it is little Abigail Breslin that steals the show.

The film keeps the atmosphere as strained as the air in Culkin’s lungs (the boy has asthma, which, like everything else in this movie, has its relevance and purpose – Shymalan doesn’t waste a minute of screen time with irrelevances in this movie). The family barricade themselves into their house, boarding up doors and windows (the logic being, if an alien can’t get out of the pantry, it “probably” can’t get into a well-defended home. (Personally, I’d be gone!) A couple of the set-pieces are extremely clever, but to catalogue them will, genuinely, spoil them for you.