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Review rated by 10 Ciao members on average: very helpful
M. Night Shayamalan is carving himself a nice little niche as the world's finest purveyor of understated, Hitchcockian suspense. First reaching prominence with the mega-successful The Sixth Sense and following it up with the underrated superhero origin fable Unbreakable, Shayamalan's tales of ordinary folk caught up in extraordinary situations has seen the writer/director/actor's stock rise considerably in recent years. It has also, somewhat unfairly, seen him labelled as something of a "king of twist endings", but hopefully Signs will help peel that particular label off.
Where The Sixth Sense dealt with the idea of ghosts walking amongst us, and Unbreakable with the birth of a superhero, Shayamalan here turns his attention to another modern myth - Ray Davies's favourite enigma - crop circles.
Playing against type, Mel Gibson toplines as Graham Hess. Hess is a preacher who has lost his faith in the wake of the tragic death of his wife, left to bring up his two young children on the family farm. He is helped out by his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a failed minor league slugger suffering from something of a lack of direction. One morning, the brothers Hess awake to find more than empty beer bottles and used contraceptives left in their field by punk kids. Crop circles have appeared all over the planet, and one of them is on the Hess farm. But where did they come from? Was it aliens? Is it a big joke by Internet dweebs? Or was it punk kids?
Truthfully, crop circles are not really the focus of the film here. Unfortunately, to elaborate much further on the plot is to give away plot spoilers, and I know how annoying that can be (by the way, did you know that Bruce Willis was a ghost in The Sixth Sense?). But suffice to say that Signs delivers shocks and suspense along the way to an ending which will firmly split people into "love it" and hate it camps.
Nicely understated performances from the two leads keep the whole shebang eminently watchable, and Phoenix is particularly excellent here. The only small gripe is Shayamalan casting himself in one of the film's most pivotal roles, having given himself cameos in his previous two films. He redeems himself with practically everything else here, not least by discovering yet another pair of non-irritating child actors to play daddy Mel's young son and even younger daughter. Who would have ever expected Macaulay Culkin's little bro to be anything other than a king-sized pain in the bum?
Signs also has a nifty line in humour, something missing from Shayamalan's other more straight-faced outings. There's a nice moment where Uncle Merrill and the two children don makeshift aluminium foil hats in an attempt to stop the aliens reading their minds.
A special mention also has to go for the use of sound. By not overusing the musical score, Shayamalan maximises the scare factor with creepy, loud or just-off-screen sound effects beautifully.
Mixing the huge scale of worldwide crop circle appearances with a very personal study of faith and the search for meaning in everyday life, Signs is a triumph. Creepy, funny and nicely played, it's a great antidote to more traditional Summer blockbuster fayre.
ens inSignsafter tackling ghosts (The Sixth Sense) and superheroes (Unbreakable). With Mel Gibson replacing Bruce Willis as the traditional Shyamalan hero--a family man tr...
ens inSignsafter tackling ghosts (The Sixth Sense) and superheroes (Unbreakable). With Mel Gibson replacing Bruce Willis as the traditional Shyamalan hero--a family man tr...
![Signs [DTS] [DVD] [2002]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/76771759.jpg)
![Vital Signs (DVD) [2006]](http://picnicb.ciao.com/uk/78188687.jpg)
02.10.2002 22:36
I'm still hoping to see this soon, sounds my sort of film. Good review - Kay