★★★★

Rating: 10/10 (13 January 2016)

In the unraveling of a story, people expect a payoff. With Signs, the payoff is the unraveling. We pick up on strange frequencies given by the somber tone of the film. We tell ourselves that nothing is there, our senses desperately scream at us otherwise, and the film builds and builds and builds.
The mastery of Signs isn't in its concept, but rather in the way it manages to sustain a certain tone of trepidation, and deliver upon it in progressively suspenseful ways to the very end. Movies like Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and "Unbreakable" have been wise in the ways they've concealed a crucial element to understanding the true nature of themselves right in plain sight-- the telling felt off, right up until their realities were overturned while leaving audiences frantically working out the logistics of the newly defined truth in their heads. Signs has honed this skill, and uses it to suspend our need for explanation while all around, things have never felt more wrong. The unease inherent in fearing something just beyond our ability to see and hear is something we are more receptive to than any other type of fear; command over this instinct is what separates bad horror movies from good ones, then good ones from great ones.
From the opening credits, we are granted insight into how the movie works. At first, the words are introduced with slow fade-ins and the aid of subdued violins. Low-key, before a Hitchcockian score cuts through the repose and the title is introduced like a jump cut to something unfriendly. The title cards are now shown in regular cuts, but then- whoosh!- now they're zooming onto the screen with the score now in full Psycho-mode. This is escalation, and it reflects perfectly the aim of this film and the way it chooses to go about it. The opening shot is just as disseminating: a normal backyard in all respects, and yet... Something is Wrong.
The backyard belongs to a farm in rural Pennsylvania, under the ownership of Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) and his family of two kids, Bo (Abigail Breslin) and Morgan (Rory Culkin). Graham is a former priest who seems to have lost his faith ever since an incident that left his family a little emptier. Bo, his daughter, cannot ever seem to finish a glass of water but has discomforting dreams that seem to mean something for the family; the dreams are never brought into the spotlight, cannily remaining in the fringes of the movie's focus for us to interpret. Morgan is the son who suffers from asthma and maintains his faith despite his father. They are accompanied by Hess' brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix). They are already a broken family before the crop circles form in their field, and we start seeing things, signs. Of?
Terror is quiet. We stare for longer than we should because we think we saw something. We listen intently, and hear nothing, and we listen harder. Skillfully done horror doesn't manifest in the form of tangible scares, but in their absence. You remember the saying by Hitchcock: "There's two people having breakfast and there's a bomb under the table. If it explodes, that's a surprise. But if it doesn't..." Dogs bark at nothing, the wind blows strangely, and it's as if what's hidden is right in the characters' faces. Right in the air they breathe. In a scene that has the characters parsing a book on the possibility of extraterrestrials, I thought back to Jaws.
Whatever they are, the things we can't see, we perceive them through secondhand means. We see shadows, we hear noises, silhouettes in the night slink in and out of view. When footage of them is captured, the image quality is low and grainy; we see just enough. Fewer things are more disturbing than catching a glimpse of someone's, or something's, head dart behind a wall. Because our terror is inflamed by what we can't sense and justified by the few times we can, their presence extends far past what we can physically make of them and locks the whole movie in a state of omnipresent dread.
Our knowledge of the aliens is as sparse as it is beside the point. News reports aren't that informative or knowledgeable-- realistically, they know as little as we do. Although we know the spaceships are there, we can't see them. We know there must be panic brewing down there, but we never see any rioting or commotion; by diverting the focus away from scenes of pandemonium in the streets and in homes, we aren't given a means of climactic catharsis standard to the aftermaths of alien invasion movies. The crop circles explain pretty much nothing and everything. We don't have to know where they come from, just that it's obviously unnatural. Our imaginations take care of the rest. Quite a bit is left up to the viewer's imagination, but Shyamalan gives us the tools to start out. When crickets suddenly stop chirping, he gives us room to consider why.
The story is all the more real for keeping its scope limited to the experiences of a few. They live ordinary lives, are surrounded by ordinary things. That these events are transpiring is all the more unnerving because whatever normal is, this isn't. Signs gets under your skin, inside your mind, takes your most primal fears and plays hide-and-seek with them. Don't look in the pantry.