Signs

It's behind you! (Your best work, I mean)

In last week's column, I fell to musing about tall-tale movies and the way they can carry you along despite the wildest implausibilities. In the end, it's all to do with faith: a question of whether you believe that a film will lead you towards revelation or just leave you stranded up mystification creek. A recent master of such tale-spinning has been M Night Shyamalan, the narrative prodigy whose brilliantly spare The Sixth Sense led us around in a grey haze of enigma before hitting us with a twist ending that transformed the meaning of what went before, so that a simple spine-chiller took on an unexpectedly poignant metaphysical spin.

Shyamalan's follow-up Unbreakable pulled a similar trick, nuttier and arguably more daring, but made you worry for his career: imagine having to churn out these twists forever, condemned to be a big-budget O Henry. However, with his new film Signs, you realise that Shyamalan really has more elevated aims in sight. It's not enough to entertain by pulling the rug out from under our feet, he wants to give us a spiritual uplift too. It makes perfect sense, if you think about it. He lets us stumble around in the valley of doubt and disorientation, then behold, leads us to the peak of sudden understanding: the time-honoured Old Switcheroo as an allegory of divine illumination.

Signs is working explicitly towards such revelation from the start. Mel Gibson – weary, saggy-faced and careworn – is Graham Hess, a Pennsylvania farmer and former Episcopalian minister who has lost his faith. The title says it all: the signs in question are huge crop circles that are mysteriously appearing around the world, but might they also be spiritual portents? When Hess discovers one carved in the cornfield behind his house, he's sure it's the work of local pranksters because he can't bring himself to entertain a supernatural explanation. He obviously hasn't seen that other spiritual schmaltzfest Field of Dreams, or he might have suspected Kevin Costner of annexing his land for a new baseball stadium.

Since his wife died in a road accident, Hess has ditched the dog-collar and slumped taciturnly around the house he shares with his brother (Joaquin Phoenix, sympathetic in a colourless nice-guy role) and two children (pale, steely Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin, an indigestibly winsome moppet). If you don't twig from the start that this will be a story about the testing of spiritual belief, consider the following. "Please stop calling me 'Father'," Hess begs Cherry Jones's amiable local cop. "What's wrong?" she says. "I don't hear my children," he replies. Literally, he means he can't hear his two kids, out playing in the cornfields; but metaphorically, do you see, he's become deaf to the calling of his faith. The corn is as high as an elephant's eye.

Even so, what makes Signs a fascinating anomaly among Hollywood films is that not much happens in it – or rather, it all happens elsewhere. One minute the aliens seem to be skittering around on Gibson's roof, the next they're all over the world, causing newscasters to babble that "everything they wrote in science books is about to change." You'd expect a Hollywood film to lay on apocalyptic fireworks, but Shyamalan is a consummate less-is-more merchant. We have to settle for an alien sighting on TV (unfortunately it looks like a Dom Joly Trigger Happy prank) and mysterious lights over Mexico City, followed by an equally mysterious absence of lights over Mexico City. Shyamalan's trademark theme, you could say, is absence – things being at once there and not there, which was the whole premise of The Sixth Sense. That theme is signalled here by the crucifix-shaped empty patch on Hess's wall – his belief a hole waiting to be filled in. It's as crassly tasteful a bit of symbolism as there ever was.

Things get lower-key still: just when you think the film is bound to open out and give us multitudes pouring out of flaming metropolises, as in Independence Day, or glittering celestial jukeboxes in Close Encounters style, Shyamalan gives us neither: the family simply retreats into their cellar. He even pulls a rather dazzling trick down there. Dazzling because it's anything but: at a decisive moment of suspense, he distracts us with an extended close-up of a flashlight lying on the floor.

Fans of sci-fi spectacle may boil over with frustration: this is as introspective as the genre gets. Much of the action takes place within the cramped, oppressively brown interiors of Gibson's house, with Shyamalan framing for the maximum of empty space and telling drabness. When events seem about to take flight, Gibson and Phoenix sit down and debate the nature of belief, their voices hanging in dead, vacant stillness: not even Hungarian art films go for so much muttering and whispering. As we wait for something to happen, suspense turns to apprehension, and apprehension to fatigue: perhaps that's how Shyamalan hopes to condition us into receptivity to his message.

What that message appears to be is a sombre-minded plea for fortitude a year after 11 September: believe in miracles, Shyamalan says, and we may all pull through. More provocatively, however, the script seems also to critique the inadequacies of America's response to trauma: facing the unknowable, Hess reacts by keeping his children away from the television, which he locks in the cupboard. The message seems to be that America's fatal flaw is its reluctance to look outside itself: while others crowd together, Hess decides his family will stick it out on the old homestead.

Yet Shyamalan fails to follow this theme through: the pay-off suggests that, whatever is happening elsewhere, the only drama we need be concerned with is this one family's. This is rather a step backwards from Close Encounters, where Richard Dreyfuss's character came to realise that he was only a bystander gawping at a spectacle far bigger than him. Signs finally appeals to an enduring middle-American fear: that the Martians/the Reds/Al-Qa'ida are after your farm in particular. The cosmic event in this film is effectively laid on just so that one man can iron out his religious doubts.

Signs ends with a revelation of what-it-all-means, but this time, instead of turning our perceptions inside out, the effect is simply to make us realise that Shyamalan has been doing some extremely banal, awkward pulling of narrative strings. Where his two previous films genuinely wrong-footed you (so that you emerged either slack-jawed or simply going "Doh!"), this time you feel you've been manipulated by a cynical and not terribly adept soapbox preacher. Signs wants you to perceive the hand of God, but all you discover is a shaky-handed Shyamalan playing Great Oz behind a tattered curtain.

j.romney@independent.co.uk