We didn’t often go to the movies as a whole family, but in 2002 we all saw Signs. This was back when we could be convinced to hit the theater en masse simply because a guy named Manoj—better known as “M. Night”—was making it big in Hollywood. This was a post-9/11, pre-representation time, before streaming services could serve us bespoke categories like “supernatural tearjerker Indian American mockumentaries.” I imagine that Indian American families like ours no longer feel that numinous sense of duty to turn out for films made by brown people. Now we can sit back and let a mediocre movie be, flapping in the wind, without pledging tribal fealty. It’s a kind of progress.
But as I will go to my grave babbling about, Signs is not one such mediocrity. I’ve rewatched this horror movie, about a family dealing with lost faith and unwanted aliens, several times since I first saw it as an eleven-year-old through barely parted fingers, and each time I have been ensnared in its suspense. It arrived at a critical juncture in the career of M. Night Shyamalan, who was then just four days shy of his thirty-second birthday. He was still bobbing in the waves of acclaim from The Sixth Sense (1999), and critics were only beginning to sour on a narrative device common to his confections. By now his name is synonymous with this device: a cheap last-minute plot twist that forces the viewer to watch all his other movies with bleary anticipation, waiting for the swerve. (For seven years in the middle of his career, he studiously avoided this device, before relapsing with 2015’s The Visit.)
Signs contains one such twist. Aliens who have invaded our extremely aqueous planet are suddenly found to be vulnerable to a gentle splash of water: their flesh melts away as if it has been spattered with lava. The protagonist’s home happens to be dotted with glasses of water abandoned by his fussy child. And their uncle happens to be skilled at swinging a baseball bat at those glasses to spray water at the aliens. Pretty much everyone I’ve talked to has found the water twist insurmountably stupid, and contemporary reviewers dumped on the fussily constructed but unsatisfying internal logic. “It must be terribly confining to work in such a way, to diminishing returns,” wrote Peter Rainer in New York. “Shyamalan wants to be the metaphysical poet of movies, but he’s dangerously close to becoming its O. Henry.”
But the genius of Signs, its mood, cannot be undone by any plot twist. Shyamalan’s control of atmosphere peaked here, in this movie of tiny gestures. Signs is defined by its seeping sense of unease, like cold water working its way through shoes and into socks and skin. A widowed man (Mel Gibson) and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) are living on a farm in Pennsylvania, trying to make sense of a supposed alien invasion. Once it is revealed as legitimate, they struggle to protect their kids (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin). Crop circles and little green men from space might be blunt and shopworn images, but they work well with Shyamalan’s strategy of oblique suggestion. He doesn’t let us see the aliens for the bulk of the movie. The score shrouds everything in paranoia: a shivery, darting piano theme circles our antagonists in panicked loops. The aliens are glimpsed only in passing: a thin limb peeking through the cornstalks, or a hand scuttling underneath a pantry door, or a clicking sound over a baby monitor. Our imaginations are free to conjure up creatures much more terrifying than any movie—not to mention early-aughts visual effects—could possibly depict. The indirect approach is a great workaround when Shyamalan’s subject, the common alien, has been sapped of all its fear by cliché and Will Smith alike.
When humanity finally does capture its first image of the elusive invaders, Shyamalan delivers the best-earned jump scare of his career, with some masterful diegetic camerawork. The oafish Uncle Merrill, sitting in a closet with a tiny TV, has woken up to a newscast. An anchor is saying, “What you’re about to see”—then there is a pregnant pause, during which the eleven-year-old me realized his shit was about to get thoroughly rocked—“may disturb you.” Cut to camcorder footage of a birthday party in Brazil. Children run around and pile up by a window, shrieking at something they see outside. Their fear becomes our fear. The camcorder lingers on an alleyway, and off beat, without warning, an alien saunters by. Merrill screams, rewinds, pauses the TV on the frame. This is the most we should ever see of the alien: frozen VHS footage on a small screen, maximizing the fear-to-pixel ratio. But after a movie’s worth of restraint, Shyamalan’s directorial hand falters. He can’t resist. At the movie’s climax he presents the whole alien in the light of day, and it is so pathetic, juddering, puttylike—ultimately just another little green man—that you feel silly for having been scared at all.
I remember, as a child, feeling embarrassed for having been so scared of those aliens for the previous hour. But over the intervening years I forget that, and I watch it again. My opinion falls somewhere in line with Roger Ebert’s begrudging take: “I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff,” he wrote of the movie’s conclusion. “The mechanical resolution of a movie’s problems is something we sit through at the end, but it’s the setup and the buildup that keep our attention. ‘Signs’ is all buildup. It’s still building when it’s over.”
For me, Signs keeps building between viewings too. I know it will disappoint me at the end, but it still scares me, and it still makes me laugh in a way that Shyamalan hasn’t managed to make me do since. Merrill shouts in Spanish at the Portuguese-speaking children in the newscast. A wooden Mel Gibson threatens unseen aliens with the cornpone lingo of an uptight man of faith. These are simple people responding in recognizably human ways to unimaginable horror, and it all checks out tonally. Humor and fear are blended more successfully (and intentionally) than in Shyamalan’s later work. By The Happening (2008), a film about mass suicide that even its lead, Mark Wahlberg, was sharp enough to later recognize as a “really bad movie,” Shyamalan managed to render hilarious a child’s death by shotgun; it did not seem remotely intentional. More recently, he made a movie about a beach that turns you old when you stand on it. It’s called Old. I don’t seek out his movies anymore, but after a brief spell as an industry pariah, he has embraced a life of making thrillers, and is commercially viable once again; he doesn’t need my family’s butts in the seats.
On my most recent viewing of Signs, I found myself thinking about how far we have drifted from its world. In one scene, a rural ex-priest and a washed-up minor-league baseball player sit on a sofa late at night and discuss whether certain phenomena are coincidences or part of some broader design. If these same two characters were to get together to share their theories in 2024, they would undoubtedly believe in aliens; they might also believe, after doing their own research, that those aliens are elected officials who harvest hormones from innocent children, and that something should be done about it, perhaps even with guns. Conspiratorial pattern recognition had a different flavor back then. The family wears literal tinfoil hats in the movie. Shyamalan’s perspective is one of a faintly spiritual seeker, something much warmer and quainter than message-board-induced neurotoxicity. Maybe A. O. Scott, writing in The New York Times, saw more clearly where we were headed: “The movie’s fuzzy pop-spiritualism carries a disturbing implication. Unless you have faith (in something tactfully left unspecified), it says, you are putting the integrity of your family and the very lives of your children at risk.”
One story the movie tells, indirectly, is about how smoothly all of humanity unites against a nonhuman antagonist, overcoming any cultural fissures within or between nations, sharing and adopting improvised solutions, in order to ensure common survival. Watching this during the pandemic, I felt it had a fresh layer of humor—or terror, you decide. I wouldn’t have noticed this on first viewing, but several reviews spoke, with mixed feelings, about Signs as a specifically post-9/11 movie: “One of the most effective movies so far at capturing a jittery nation’s case of the yips,” as Ann Hornaday put it in The Washington Post, before anyone knew how belligerent those yips could be. I can see the movie now as a snapshot of a time when I knew less, before the twin forces of American paranoia and empire had fully revealed themselves to me—and before the talent of the first major Indian American filmmaker revealed itself to be a little smaller, or at least weirder, than I’d first suspected.
