M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs opens on a farm in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where a former Episcopal priest named Graham Hess wakes to find a crop circle cut into his cornfield. It is August 2002. The film runs 106 minutes. And for a while, it is very good.
Trailer, via M. Night Shyamalan.
The Crop Circle in Graham Hess’s Cornfield
The setup is spare and precise. Graham (Mel Gibson) lives with his asthmatic son Morgan (Rory Culkin) and his young daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin), who will not touch water she thinks is contaminated. His brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a failed minor league ballplayer, has moved in since Graham’s wife Colleen died in a traffic collision six months earlier. Graham left the church after that. He does not explain why, and the film is better for not making him.
The crop circles spread. Lights appear over cities worldwide. Morgan picks up noises on Bo’s old baby monitor. Merrill is convinced after seeing footage from Brazil of an unidentified humanoid. Graham insists there is a reasonable explanation. Then he sees an intruder standing on his roof.
The Pantry Door and the Severed Fingers
Shyamalan plays the veterinarian Ray Reddy, the man who killed Colleen. Reddy calls Graham to his house, tells him he has locked a creature in the pantry, and leaves for the lake, believing the things avoid water. Graham looks under the door. A clawed hand swipes at him, and he severs its fingers.
That scene is the film’s best argument for itself. It is a horror beat built out of almost nothing — a door, a hallway, a hand — and it lands because Shyamalan has spent an hour making a farmhouse feel like the only place on Earth. The family boards up the windows and doors. That night something breaks in, and they retreat to the basement, where Morgan has an asthma attack and his medication is upstairs.
Faith, Kinship, and What the Script Cannot Hold
Signs wants to be about faith. Graham abandoned the church after his wife died, and the film means to bring him back through the invasion. It does not earn that. The theology arrives as a set of coincidences arranged so neatly that the ending feels less like grace than like a screenwriter closing a loop. Bo’s water fixation, Morgan’s asthma, Merrill’s swing — each one is a plant, and each one pays off on cue.
The performances hold better than the structure. Gibson plays grief as exhaustion rather than spectacle. Phoenix gives Merrill a soft, aimless quality that makes the brother worth watching. Breslin, very young here, is genuinely strange in the right way.
The script is where the film loses its footing. Shyamalan has said nothing about aliens, and the film keeps its creatures mostly off-screen, which is the correct choice. But the dialogue turns stiff whenever the movie reaches for meaning, and the worldwide invasion is staged almost entirely through television footage — a limitation the film never turns into an idea.
What Holds and What Doesn’t
The atmosphere is real. James Newton Howard’s score does quiet work, and the cinematography keeps the cornfield at the edge of the frame until it becomes the whole frame. The film was a financial success, grossing $408 million on a $72 million budget, the seventh-highest-grossing film of 2002. It earned positive reviews and award nominations from the Online Film Critics Society and the Empire Awards, and won an award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. The Blu-ray, with Shyamalan’s commentary, deleted scenes and making-of material, arrived on June 3, 2008.
None of that settles the question. Signs is a tight, well-made thriller with one great scare and a third act that mistakes arrangement for meaning. It is worth seeing for the pantry door alone.
Key Facts
- Title: Signs (2002)
- Director/Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
- Runtime: 106 minutes
- Premiere: August 2, 2002
- Budget: $72 million
- Gross: $408 million
- Score: 5.9 of 10
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
