By GREG DIXON
(Herald rating: * * * * )
Signs are everywhere in M. Night Shyamalan's new film.
The director and writer of that sweet and eerie ghost film The Sixth Sense and the curious superhero parable Unbreakable has chosen crop circles as this year's movie leitmotif and a springboard for Signs, a psychological thriller about a tragedy-struck family confronted with an unfathomable mystery.
But as Gibson's stoic Graham Hess, a padre who has lost his faith, battles to save his family from the unknown, the director fills the screen and his story with signs from a host of other films, too. Signs has elements of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Day Of The Triffids, The Exorcist and even The Others, to mention a few.
Much of that is perhaps down to the territory.
But it is one of Shyamalan's heroes, the great suspense director Alfred Hitchcock, whose presence is the most palpable. The old master's style is everywhere.
Shyamalan understands, as Hitchcock did, that real fear - and this almost seems quaint in a Hollywood picture these days - depends almost never on what is seen but instead on what is heard.
In this, Shyamalan is a fairly masterful if old-fashioned film-maker himself as he turns the familiar into the frighteningly unfamiliar: a baby monitor spurts strange sounds, wind chimes tinkle without a breath of wind, birds rise and scatter at nothing and dogs growl without reason.
As well Shyamalan, and this too is now rare in Yank films, uses silence extremely well. He generates tension with its void, making ordinary sounds - soft footsteps or the squeak of a screen door opening - something quite different in the hush.
You often find yourself holding your breath and just listening.
Visually it's the same. A field of corn and a flashlight are about as complicated as it gets - the dark taking the place of silence - with Shyamalan instead setting much of his film inside the creaking and claustrophobic interiors of Hess' farm house and mind. But if Shyamalan has limited himself almost to a single location, his story-telling has greater breadth - there are not one but two narratives.
The first comes from the mysterious crop circles which appear overnight, not only in Hess' field, but around the world. What can they mean? What do they portend? Nobody knows and, in a clever inversion of the usual movie convention, even the TV news experts are unsure and panicked.
Against all this, Hess and his family battle unseen demons and a tragedy.
Both narrative strands are leavened with a gentle humour and some fine performances, including those from young actors Culkin and Beslin.
It is just unfortunate for the film's overall effect and success that, after a finely-crafted manufacturing of taut fear, these stories resolve in, well, corny ways.
In Signs, Shyamalan repeats his now established style of a still and melancholy dread. And, given Signs sits in a genre now dominated by breakneck computer-generated action, that is perhaps enough.
Cast: Mel Gibson, Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, Abigail Beslin
Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Running time: 120m
Rating: M
Screening: Village and Hoyts now
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.
Latest from Lifestyle
How Gen Zers made the crossword their own
New York Times: Clues require internet meme literacy.