SIGNS

A former reverend, widowed and with two children to support, lives with his brother on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. One morning, in his cornfield, a large pictogram mysteriously appears, constructed by bending the stalks into circles and lines. The local animals are nervous. Television offers reports showing hundreds of other similar signs, appeared all over the world. The end of the world? An invasion? Among the new Hollywood talents, M. Night Shyamalan stands out as one of the most talented directors and screenwriters around. After treating us to the scares of "The Sixth Sense" and the subtle, yet brilliant, reimagining of a superhero's origin in "Unbreakable," he now offers us a future classic of science fiction: "Signs." His ability to manipulate classics, in this case "The War of the Worlds," into new and astonishing forms is of rare and enviable mastery. The film is a tense and convincing science fiction thriller, rich in scares and memorable scenes. Shyamalan uses the silences, the few lights, and the looming darkness from the fields to create a claustrophobic atmosphere, in which everything that is not seen, for once, is scarier than the visible and tangible. Are the aliens arriving? Will they be hostile? The family lives the world drama, parallel to the more intimate one of the protagonist's loss of faith, from inside the house, with TV as the only contact with the outside. Gore lovers will be disappointed: not a drop of blood in the entire film, but like "The Others" before it, "Signs," thanks to a direction that finds in Hitchcock its guiding spirit, puts itself in contention among the best suspense films of recent years. Mel Gibson is in great form, convincing in his role, as is his "brother" Joaquin Phoenix, a young actor of great talent revealed in "8mm." The children are excellent and create with their father a suffering and credible bond. It is precisely the drama of the characters, their past, and their future choices that allow us a true immersion of emotion in the crescendo of unsettling and literally terrifying events that will befall them. The dialogues are slow, careful, studied to give true humanity to the reactions of ordinary people in the face of the inscrutable, well-timed pauses that precede the sudden moments of tension. And those in the corn are certainly not the only signs of the film, see to understand. Only flaw: an ending not entirely convincing, but you will decide for yourselves. Intelligent, minimalist (in the good sense) cinema, always permeated by an underlying humor and never out of place, Shyamalan's is a breath of fresh air in a landscape where originality is lacking. A pleasure to hear the murmurs of tension from the audience in the theater and the jumps in the seats. Highly recommended.