A common thread throughout the best works of M. Night Shyamalan is one’s grappling with their own mortality. This ideology is most recently seen in his newest thriller, Old, which takes the filmmaker’s existential ruminations to admittedly on-the-nose levels with its setting—a beach that rapidly accelerates the aging process of those who inhabit it. But Shyamalan has explored this subject in far more fascinating, intimate and deeply realized methods, from the heartbreaking car scene between Toni Collette and Haley Joel Osment at the end of The Sixth Sense to the entire psyche of Bruce Willis’ protagonist in Unbreakable. But with 2002’s Signs, these meditations are deliberately woven into every moment, ultimately crafting one of his finest and arguably underrated films.
“I think God did it.” In this early line spoken by Morgan (Rory Culkin) to his father, Graham (Mel Gibson), after the discovery of a massive crop circle in their fields, Shyamalan zeroes in on the film’s most apparent and immediate themes: faith. Graham isn’t so sure of his son’s assertion, despite being a former Episcopal priest. Our central character, having lost his faith and abandoned the church after his wife’s death in a traffic accident six months prior, attributes the crop circles to vandals even if he can’t quite explain the logistics of how such an intricate alteration could be accomplished.
And how exactly do we rationalize that which cannot be explained or understood? Whether it’s a peculiar crop circle or the unexpected death of a loved one, the sudden curveballs of life often come with a soulful, internal wrestling attached. Some people bargain. Some make excuses. Some simply ignore or deny in hopes that willful oblivion can overpower a frustrating lack of answers. In one of the film’s most emotionally charged scenes, Graham explains to his brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), that there are two types of people in the world—those who affirm that all events are governed by chance, and those who believe in a higher power and insist there’s a reason for everything. At this point in the film, Graham insists his faith has all but vanquished, but as the trajectory of the story’s extraterrestrial events expand he is consistently challenged to reconsider his interpretations of why things are the way that they are.
Released just shy of a year after September 11, 2001, it’s interesting to ponder how much these dilemmas of faith factored into the film’s production. Even if the national tragedy didn’t play a key role in Signs’ creation, it most certainly became an inevitable thematic fixture in a story which finds its protagonists obtaining all their information via televised news in real time. When the film released in August of 2002, it would seem impossible for viewers at the time not to correlate Joaquin Phoenix’s shocked reaction to an alien spotted at a Brazilian birthday party to the sheer horror of witnessing planes fly into the towers. I’d imagine many related to the film’s explorations of faith, too, considering so many devout individuals at the time were also sucked into the news cycle, likely wondering to themselves, “How could God let this happen?”
The film is arguably even more fascinating and pertinent now, with 9/11 replaced by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and televised static swapped with the incessant news alerts and doom-scrolling of the digital age. Throw in the climate crisis, income inequality, racial injustice and everything else going on in this fucked up world and the belief-based reckonings of Signs feel almost transcendent. It’s truly difficult not to look around at everything and feel a complete loss of hope, but Shyamalan’s film is a beacon that challenges its viewers to reconsider the ways they approach the concept of faith.
It’s also a staggeringly confident work aside of its thematic associations. All performances within the ensemble are aces, particularly Gibson in one of his finest roles. In addition to his aforementioned monologue on chance and faith, some of the actor’s best moments in the film are unspoken, as seen in his exchange with Ray Reddy (Shyamalan), the man responsible for his wife’s fatal accident, as well as an extremely powerful scene where he loses his temper at the dinner table then pulls his entire family in for a tearful embrace. Also consider the sharp cinematography by Tak Fujimoto, Barbara Tulliver’s meticulous editing work and a rousing score by James Newton Howard, and Signs cements itself as a remarkable example of creative collaboration hitting all the right notes.
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