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Shyamalan does it again
LOOKING FOR SIGNS: Farmer Hess (Mel Gibson) checks his fields.
Signs (ENGLISH)
Cast: Mel Gibson, Rory Culkin, Abigail Breslin
Dir: Manoj Night Shyamalan
THE HISTORY of future is unfolding on the silver screen. And Manoj Shyamalan is busy scripting it. Quietly, unobtrusively. His films move at a speed, which is brisk without being fast. And contain action without being in the action-packed category. What's more, he blends science fiction with human emotion. As a cinemagoer you cannot demand a better bargain.
His latest presentation - Signs - which is centred around the crop circle mystery that keeps the Graham Hess family on tenterhooks with the possibility of another visit by the aliens - scares the wits out of you, frightens you, and strangely even leaves you doubling over in laughter. This film is a rare offering, it is scary without being spooky. If fear feeds fear, this film makes a class case.
Here fear does not come clothed as a ghost or an eight-legged freak but there is fear everywhere. In the field, in the wind, at home, in the market. And above all, in the mind, in the dread of apprehension.
Signs is a thriller set in Pennsylvania. Focussing on the mysterious appearance of crop circles carved into a family farm, it is a rare appearance that has the scientists searching for an explanation and the immediately affected family cowering in fear. The baby of the family thinks the fridge water is contaminated, the dog barks at being fed. There has to be something wrong somewhere. But where? The film provides Mel Gibson a meaty role. He digs his teeth into it to come up with a flesh and blood portrayal of Graham Hess, the harried father, now strong, now sullen, now silent, now seething. It is a difficult role, calling for many shades of human emotions made easy by the man who knows what the director wants.
This film rides on a strong under-layer of emotion and uses the soundtrack to terrific effect. The director has us in a daze with sounds which are everyday like yet appear eerie with just their timing. Forget sounds, even silence is at times scary here. It transmits the joy of the unexpected. When everything is still and silent, you know a scream is just a whisper away; and then after a scream there would be deadly silence. Yet, it does not work out quite that way. It makes you dig up experiences to relate to and still makes you forget yourself, empathise with the Hess family.
You don't realise when does it begin and moves on along its 120-minute journey, you do not realise it when it is over. When the inevitable, though entirely unpredictable strikes, you are not prepared, when it grips you there is no way out. And strangely, when it is over, you wish, it would go on. That's the beauty of Signs, Manoj Shyamalan's latest. And probably the best. Forget Unbreakable, forget The Sixth Sense, here he has sure signs of grand success. And if anyone whispers that Shyamalan struck a 10 million dollar deal for Unbreakable just let him know in the ear only that records are meant to be broken. No sixth sense working here. Just plain-speaking.
For one thing though one would blame Shyamalan. He treats his viewers like a puppet, shows them only as much as he wants, uses them to further his story - half of the thrill of watching this film lies in the instant reactions of horror from the audiences; reactions, which one must clarify, quickly give way to full-throated laughter. More than the possible catastrophe, it is the possibility of disaster and its imminence, which has the audiences gripping the arm-rest of their chair.
ZIYA US SALAM
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