M. Night Shyamalan’s Best-Directed Film Is Also His Most Overlooked

One of contemporary cinema’s master storytellers, M. Night Shyamalan has been crafting thought-provoking visions of doomsday arriving on the doorstep for over a quarter-century.

Fascinated by crises of faith and family, and obsessed with exploring their metaphysical manifestations, the Philadelphia filmmaker occupies a Twilight Zone-esque other-realm in the blockbuster landscape. Spiritual and psychological mysteries intertwine, establishing an existential tension sustained primarily by the appearance of otherworldly forces that challenge each character’s most closely held beliefs and fears.

From the supernatural interventions of The Sixth Sense, his 1999 breakthrough; all the way through this summer’s Trap, in which a father’s irreconcilable identities collide in destructive fashion; and last spring’s Knock at the Cabin, also a confined story of families facing end times; Shyamalan often centers his stories around extraordinary situations that demand impossible choices.

But it’s perhaps Shyamalan’s Signs, an alien-invasion thriller that doubles as an anguished contemplation of divine will, that most distills his style of spiritual musing in genre cinema to its essence. Alongside The Sixth Sense, the film finally receives a 4K UHD Blu-Ray release this week via Disney, making this an ideal time to look back at one of Shyamalan’s most masterfully controlled exercises in suspense.

Signs, a story of lapsed faith and extraterrestrial interference, centers on the Hess clan in rural Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Grieving the tragic loss of his wife in a traffic accident months earlier, former Episcopal priest Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) awakens one morning to discover the crops in his cornfield have been flattened into intricate patterns. Graham is initially skeptical that the crop circles represent anything more than a few neighborhood vandals having a laugh at his expense, but their appearance contributes to his gradually escalating state of unease.

Something’s out there in the fields, he senses, and even the wind is afraid these days. His brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) and young children Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin) seem to sense it too, and the family draws closer together in anticipation. As crop circles begin to appear around the world, and sightings of extraterrestrial forces are reported, Graham is forced to grapple with what awaits his family at the end of the world.

Signs approaches its premise of an alien invasion in bracingly conceptual terms, questioning whether we’re alone in the universe and how the revelation of forces existing beyond our field of vision might inform an individual’s internal reckoning with ideas of consequence, mortality, and meaning.

Graham, who has lost his way spiritually in the aftermath of his wife’s passing, is challenged by the crop circles, and their harbinger of doom, to contemplate the relative presence or absence of some higher power — in his eyes, to examine the existence or non-existence of God. “There is no one watching out for us,” he tells Merrill. “We are all on our own.” And yet, later, as the fog of grief clouding his line of sight begins to lightly dissipate, the spate of inexplicable occurrences around the world leads his questioning in another direction: “Is it possible there are no coincidences?”

Perhaps how frequently his films are associated with another kind of revelation — the third-act twist — Shyamalan is often evaluated primarily as a narrative storyteller, but Signs powerfully reminds us as well of his marvelous craftsmanship. In Signs, the concept of otherworldly forces lurking in plain sight is reflected in Shyamalan’s point-precise shot design: in the division of a spiritually devastated family by banisters along a staircase, light emanating through door frames, wide-angle lenses placing a climactic confrontation somewhere between dreams and reality, a semi-opaque glass door recasting the world outside as a shimmering mirage of possibilities.

Through the film’s strong 4K presentation, restored in HDR from the original camera negative, Shyamalan’s treatment of darkness and light is beautifully preserved. Signs has always been a great-looking film, but the presentation here is a particular boon to its often dreamlike lighting, which keeps its aliens largely obscured in shadows even as it often lets light hazily enter through boarded-up windows and around door frames, as if pressing defiantly through the overwhelming darkness. A few scenes in particular, including one that reveals an alien on the farmhouse roof, appear to have been brightened up a touch to allow for greater clarity and crispness of image, though the presentation is overall faithful to the more muted, somber color palette Shyamalan envisioned.

If one element of Signs is distinguished most by the new 4K release, it’s the film’s transcendent, vibrantly pulsating orchestral score by James Newton Howard. This is certainly among the composer’s greatest achievements and all the more impressive for its reliance on a single motive, reflecting the film’s study of faith as resilience, which is rhythmically and melodically manipulated in time with Shyamalan’s constant recalibrations of mood and atmosphere while contributing to the film a powerful, unifying undercurrent.

With an effectively lossless 5.1 surround DTS-HD Master Audio Soundtrack, this release is the best showcase to date for Howard’s exquisitely emotive score, even as it revels also in the suspenseful silences and abrupt intrusions of sound that distinguish Shyamalan’s sonic palette. Few other thrillers, even those by Shyamalan, have exploited such subtle touches to such unnerving effect: the slow creak of footsteps on staircases, the whisper of corn stalks rustling in the midnight breeze, and the confounding addition of strange clicking sounds all factor into the film’s sense of ambient dread and ambiguity.

No extras have been added to this 4K re-release. The bonus features — which include a six-part “Making Signs” documentary, a director commentary track, featurettes on music and special effects, and a handful of deleted scenes — are instead ported over from previous Blu-Ray releases and indeed are housed on the Blu-Ray disc also included alongside the 4K.

Shyamalan, since Signs, has fallen out of favor in Hollywood and, more recently, seen his work reassessed. Those who saw his career downturn — precipitated in part by his involvement in more statedly commercial, less explicitly personal projects like The Last Airbender and After Earth — as indicative of a once-prodigious filmmaker losing touch with his ability to construct suspenseful, substantial stories have rejoiced in the career renaissance most agree was ignited by his ingenious vacation-from-hell thrillersThe Visit and Old, and that continues today.

But the 4K rerelease of both Signs and The Sixth Sense presents a valuable opportunity to look back at Shyamalan’s earlier work in appreciation of his masterful command of atmosphere and emotion. Much like Alfred Hitchcock, to whom he weathered many comparisons in the wake of The Sixth Sense’s success, Shyamalan invests time and belief in his characters’ psychological journeys, rather than busying himself with the machinations of narrative. He conveys sincerely the depth of their existential questioning.

Signs is notably quiet and downbeat, which only adds to the power of its ultimate revelations — those related to the aliens and their surprising weakness, yes, but also those relevant to Graham’s desperate efforts to make sense of the unimaginable in his family life. Ultimately, with Signs, Shyamalan turns the premise of an alien invasion into a moving meditation on crises of faith that reveal divine powers hidden all over. Bringing his ambitions as a craftsman together with his intentions as a storyteller, it remains a high point in Shyamalan’s filmography.

Signs is now available on 4K UHD Blu-Ray.