An expert at work...

Rating: 10/10 (23 November 2002)

Leave it to M. Night Shyamalan to take our expectations for a movie, turn them upside down, and still deliver a work surpassing anything we'd dared hope for.
With `The Sixth Sense' and `Unbreakable' the young director so immersed us in threatening, supernatural realities that we would follow him anywhere. When all roads led to remarkable twist endings, we loved him even more.
It's with high expectations, then, that audiences greet his new sci-fi thriller `Signs.' And Shyamalan waltzes into the picture clearly aware of what's expected. He knows we're on to his trickery and will spot his clever little ending a mile away, and that knowledge assures that we won't.
Shyamalan also uses the ongoing allure of UFOs and space aliens to sell a film that, ultimately, has little to do with either one.
Despite the inescapable background noise, the movie is really about the emotional and spiritual journey of a rural widower named Graham Hess (Mel Gibson). Formerly a reverend, he gave up his church after the death of his wife.
When we meet him, his days are spent tending a large farm with his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), and children Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin). It's a simple life that's turned upside down when strange crop circles show up in his field. At first, Graham is convinced it's a prank, but then they begin to appear around the world, and the possibility of alien life - perhaps even an invasion - looks realistic.
As the film runs its paces, it riffs on a number of themes more important than the crop circles themselves, but Shyamalan is smart enough to know he has to hang his hat on something. With that in mind, he hides his real issues within a first-class, neoclassical thriller. That means the scares come not from splashy, grotesque special effects but tight editing and suspenseful storytelling.
From the opening frames, Shyamalan creates an atmosphere so eerie and tense that one literally feels tired by the time the film ends. But it's a good tired, the type that comes after working on something worthwhile and being aptly rewarded for the effort.
It's safe to say nobody else could have directed this movie. The unique perspective is purely that of Shyamalan, who wrote, produced and directed.
At one turn the film feels campy, at the next desperately serious, but Shyamalan has somehow melded the diversities into a whole that plays like real life. Since that's what most people look for at the movies, the payoff is big.
Shyamalan also demonstrates an expert ability to build tension, break it with comic relief, then rebuild it. It helps that he has veterans like Gibson and Phoenix delivering the lines, but one gets the feeling this movie would have been great even without the megastars. I'm glad they signed on, though, because their names assure a big-time audience, and this is the type of film that deserves one.