Signs (12)

Don't look now

Crop circles, weird rays in the night sky, the sighting of little green men: who would have the nerve to try to spook us with this old stuff? Well, in Signs M Night Shyamalan makes a pretty good stab at it, continuing the strain of acute but inexplicable dread he has fostered in his previous two movies, The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. I wasn't a great fan of either of them, though there is something cherishable in Shyamalan's style that sets him apart from his peers (he is still only 31) and aligns him more closely to European film-making than the whizz-bang blockbuster culture in which his movies are promoted. It's a refusal to be hurried, a willingness to stay with a scene until it yields up precisely the emotional lode required: patience, in a word, one of the most underrated virtues in cinema.

Look at the way he composes his shots in this new film, the slight tilt of the camera as it focuses upon a house front, or the floor-level shot of a man about to exit a doorway before turning back and walking towards the lens. Even the image of a family of four clambering upon the roof of a car seems to echo the piteous straining of survivors in Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa. Like Hitchcock, whose influence is very apparent here, he instinctively understands how the camera can be a supple and expressive instrument. But where the technique flows with invention and authority, the thematic content sometimes weighs so heavily on Shyamalan's films as to make them feel portentous and costive. This was especially true of Unbreakable, a Bruce Willis superhero movie which, because it moved at funereal pace, thought it was a profound meditation on good and evil.

Shyamalan's preoccupation with the uncanny takes a curious turn in Signs, an oddly structured movie that seems for long periods a near-abstract exercise in building suspense. It stars Mel Gibson as Graham Hess, a farmer in picture-book Pennsylvania who finds his property menaced by unseen intruders. At first he thinks it's just some local tearaways, but then a more ominous mood takes hold; his young daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin) senses it in her reluctance to drink the water; his son Morgan (Rory Culkin) knows something is up from the way the family dog has been barking in the night. What finally prompts Graham to call the local police officer (Cherry Jones) is the spectacular disfigurement of his cornfield, on which geometric patterns have been meticulously trampled: no self-respecting hoaxers would try anything as passé as crop circles, would they?

The signs, whatever they portend, are disquieting, the more so to a man whose spirit is already raw to the touch. Graham is still in recovery from two massive bereavements, the first of them his wife in a meaningless car accident, the second his faith, which followed her to the grave. Shyamalan releases this background detail a piece at a time, so that a full half-hour goes by before we realise that Graham used to be an Episcopalian priest – "Stop calling me Father," he chides a girl at the town chemist's, who asks him to hear her confession all the same. There's further confusion over the status of Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), who I initially assumed was older brother to Bo and Morgan but turns out to be, less plausibly, Graham's brother. And, guess what, Merrill has demons too, holding the minor league baseball record for home runs, but also the record for strike-outs; hardly in the order of a bereavement, but they takes their sports traumas pretty seriously round here.

So we are watching a family trying to reconstitute itself as the air grows thicker with ill omen. "I think everybody in this house needs to calm down and eat some fruit or something," says Graham, lugubriously toeing the sceptical line but unable to explain why the family's old baby monitor is suddenly crackling with keening noises. Soon creeping possibilities become horrifying certainties when TV reports from around the globe agree that the crop circles are a landing strip for alien invaders. Yikes! "The nerds were right," says Merrill in quiet dismay. What's surprising here are the puckish notes of comedy Shyamalan plays beneath the enveloping paranoia, notably in the conical hats the children make from tin foil to prevent the aliens reading their minds, and the solemn way in which Bo reads aloud from a book about intergalactic visitation as if it were a government report.

Of course, the question haunting us is: will "they" appear at any stage? Shyamalan keeps us in suspense about this for so long that the movie is nearly over before he answers it, and you have to take your tin-foil hat off to him for restraint. Perhaps one shouldn't be frightened by rustling winds, indecipherable noises, lurking shadows and pattering footsteps, but I sure as hell was. This is a director who understands a basic but often neglected trick of the genre – that what we imagine is more terrifying than what we can see. The truth, to coin a phrase, may be out there, but it doesn't hold a candle to what's "in here".

Unfortunately, Shyamalan isn't content to scare us; he wants to turn his hero's crisis into a learning experience, a way of helping him claw back his lost faith. A very American idea, this, the belief that experience is always a conduit to self-realisation. Incidentally, it's a very American totem that effects the change. In Manhattan there's a scene in which Woody Allen's Ike remarks that Nazis will be marching in New Jersey, and someone adds that he's read a devastating satirical piece about it in The New York Times. "Well, a satirical piece in The Times is one thing," says Ike, "but bricks and baseball bats really gets right to the point down there." As with Nazis, so with aliens – bring on the baseball bats.