Free essay on the movie signs

Mel Gibson stars as Father Graham Hess, who lives on a farm in Bucks County, Pa. We discover he is a priest only belatedly, when someone calls him "Father." "It's not 'Father' anymore," he says. Since he has two children, it takes us a beat to compute that he must be Episcopalian. Not that it matters, because he has lost his faith.

"Signs" uses them to evoke the possibility that ... well, the possibility of anything. The genius of the film, you see, is that it isn't really about crop circles, or the possibility that aliens created them as navigational aids. I will not even say whether aliens appear in the movie, because whether they do or not is beside the point.

M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" is the work of a born filmmaker, able to summon apprehension out of thin air. When it is over, we think not how little has been decided, but how much has been experienced. Here is a movie in which the plot is the rhythm section, not the melody.

The worst attack in the film is Morgan's asthma attack, and his father tries to talk him through it, in a scene that sets the entire movie aside and is only about itself. At the end of the film, I had to smile, recognizing how Shyamalan has essentially ditched a payoff.