Signs

Strange radio transmissions received on a baby monitor. A little girl with a strange obsession with drinking water. A minister who’s lost his faith. A boy with asthma. The strikeout king of minor league baseball. Crop circles that may or may not be the work of little green men. These are the weirdly disparate elements that are woven together into the tapestry of unlikely coincidences that propel Signs, the new film by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable).

Signs is the story of Graham Hess, a minister who quit the church after losing his faith in the wake of his wife’s accidental death. Hess has since withdrawn from the world, now living on a farm with his two children and his younger brother Merrill, a failed professional baseball player. The safe isolation of their lives is disrupted when they discover one morning that crop circles have mysteriously appeared in their cornfield overnight. They first suspect the circles are a prank, but strange things continue to help, and soon is it clear that something truly unique is happening. The suspense builds as Hess and his family try to unravel the mystery of what’s suddenly happening all over the world.

Unfortunately, Signs is closer to director Shyamalan’s last film, Unbreakable, than it is to Sixth Sense. It has plenty of jump-up-in-your-seat suspense (thanks mostly to overbearing sound editing), but the story relies to heavily on weird plot coincidences and borrowed (though well-executed) genre conventions. Imagine Alfred Hitchcock directing a film adaptation of War of the Worlds—the movie jumbles together episodes of the X-Files, Twilight Zone, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents with reckless abandon, and much of the visual style of the final third of the movie is ripped-off from Night of the Living Dead.

Warning: buying into the movie’s dramatic premise requires the viewer to make some fairly strenuous leaps over some significant gaps in logic, which I suppose may have been unavoidable given that the movie’s story is based on the dubious notion that crop circles might actually be something more than an overwrought prank brought to you courtesy of students at the nearby university. You just have to be willing to overlook some basic Hollywood dumbness in order to properly enjoy this movie. If you’re not prepared to willingly suspend disbelief, this is not the film for you.

Despite it flaws, Signs manages to hold interest until the end and many of the absurdities that go overlooked while you in the theater don’t set in until you’ve already enjoyed the movie enough to forgive it its vices. It’s every bit as ridiculous as Unbreakable, but Signs is suspenseful enough that it’s much harder to dismiss . . . at least until you’ve had a few days to think about it.