As usual with director Shyamalan, he eschews explicitness in favor of mental jolts and emotional depth. This allows us to engage with the drama in a more meaningful way, as we are filling in for what we do not see with our own imaginations. Moreover, his ostensible plot forms the basis for a disquisition on religious faith and family values.
Much like the Exorcist before it, signs places at the center of its action a Trinitarian priest who has apparently lost his faith because his wife has been killed in a road accident. In truth, he still believes in god and has merely changed his relation to Him for one of love to one of outright hate.
The film's subtlety is its greatest strength. The director's technique proves he has great confidence in his ideas and he is willing to do what few other filmmakers are. Long takes, not moving the camera, stars with their backs to the camera, for example. And yet he gets away with it because the strong emotional undercurrent to his movies draws you in even as you are required to do half the work. You are not being spoon-fed by a movie director who thinks his audience is essentially dumb. The effort required is oddly flattering to one's self esteem hence his popular success.
Yet despite all this, Shyamalan still has room for humor; thus proving that he does not take himself too seriously and is not held back by the constraints of an ego that does not know itself at all well
Where this film fails is Shyamalan generalized inability to make his execution the equal of his concepts in making them believably real and convincing. If aliens are harmed by water, why invade a planet that's 70% water? If aliens possess advanced technology, why do they have such difficulty entering a wooden house - albeit that it is boarded up?
However, Shyamalan would be a much better filmmaker if he could find convincing plots that suitably enhanced and allowed him to explore his ideas. These (apart from the Sixth Sense) are mired in a too abstract view of reality rather than being solidly grounded within it. Like Quentin Tarantino, Shyamalan does not seem to live in the same world the rest of us 'civilians' do and his work suffers more for it.
Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.
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