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All-Reviews.com Movie/Video Review
Signs
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 out of 4
Review by Susan Granger
3 stars out of 4
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Writer/director M. Night Shyamalan ("The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable")
specializes in weird supernatural thrillers and, this time, he explores the
meaning of faith and the myth of coincidence. The perplexing story revolves
around what happens when a widower farmer (Mel Gibson) - a former minister who
has left the Church but whom everyone still calls "Father" - his children (Rory
Culkin, Abigail Breslin), his ex-baseball-player brother (Joaquin Phoenix) and
local police officer (Cherry Jones) find huge hieroglyphs in his bucolic Bucks
County, Pennsylvania, cornfield and discover a mysterious, malevolent alien
presence. But the curious, foreboding, highly publicized crop-circles which,
seemingly, appear around the world aren't the theme here. Actually, they're red
herrings or allegorical devices. Among contemporary filmmakers, M. Night
Shyamalan has been compared with Steven Spielberg but, even more, he's a
cinematic descendant of Alfred Hitchcock, using several popular Hitchcockian
devices to shock and create suspense. Showing less and igniting the imagination
is always far scarier than what we can actually perceive. There are several
scenes reminiscent of "The Birds," while Tak Fujimoto's shadowy photography
heightens the tension as does James Newton Howard's music. Like Hitchcock,
Shyamalan delights in doing bits in his own films; you can spot him as the
driver who accidentally killed Gibson's wife. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to
10, "Signs" is a shamelessly manipulative, unabashedly spiritual 7. If you can
forgive the flawed, derivative ending, it's a real chiller thriller.
Copyright © 2002 Susan Granger
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