Signs

Signs mixes supernatural events with more traditional science fiction, but it is not just a thriller. The film is also a psychological drama.

Graham Hess lives on a farm with his children Morgan and Bo and his younger brother Merrill. Early one morning he finds a series of crop circles which together form something resembling a sign. The incident is reported to the police, but the scale of the crop circles makes it hard to believe it is just the work of mischievous hooligans. At the same time, other strange things start happening. For example, the family's dogs behave very oddly, and when the brothers chase a figure one night that moves with lightning speed, the family, not surprisingly, become rather frightened.

The Hess family are by no means the only ones who feel threatened, but since they isolate themselves on the farm, one gets the feeling that they are completely and utterly alone. Do they stand any chance at all against the threat from outside? And what thoughts go through the individual family members' minds in this stressful situation?

Signs is a middling effort from the director and screenwriter Shyamalan. The film is neither as gripping an experience as "The Sixth Sense", which became an emphatic box-office success, nor as hopeless a load of waffle as "Unbreakable". It is at its best in the atmospheric beginning, where the alien is merely hinted at and the claustrophobic feeling grows. The film will not settle for the art of suggestion, however, and the concrete depiction of the unknown threat comes close to being unintentionally comic. Martians from outer space are something we really find hard to take seriously here in the 21st century.

All the pieces fall into place in Signs, but the film's somewhat self-important blend of science fiction and weighty questions of faith and doubt works only sporadically.