It’s nice to know that there are still filmmakers like M. Night Shyamalan around. Not only is Signs his third terrific movie in a row (after The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable), but he’s built his success on the basics. This is a filmmaker who not only knows the value of strong writing, vivid characterisation, and directorial technique, but has also mastered all these skills.

It should be said that there are big things wrong with this story: the resolution of the alien menace, in particular, is too pat and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Yet Shyamalan’s strength is the small things: his staging, pacing, and direction of actors brings a reality to his films that makes them engrossing. This is basically a monster movie (or worse, a little green man movie), and Shyamalan’s technique is here employed mainly to scare. Signs might not be as emotionally satisfying as The Sixth Sense or as cerebral as Unbreakable, but it’s hard to fault a suspense film when it delivers the fright moments so well. (The audience I saw it with was fully on board, with a Blair Witch style hand-held reveal of the alien getting a particularly vocal reaction). Shyamalan is also a master of selling a resolution: in all his films, he constructs story arcs for his characters that tie to the theme and plot of the movie so tightly that the eventual conclusion seems inevitable. And because he gives real thought to the way the characters would respond to their fantastic scenario, the audience is fully involved in their plight.

The taking seriously of characters and situations that others would play as camp is the first of several ways in which the film closely resembles George Romero’s classic Night of the Living Dead. Like Romero, Shyamalan suggests that the drama in this one setting parallels a wider confrontation. Yet where Romero’s film unsettled through its overt horror and sheer bleakness, Shyamalan is more visually sophisticated, using all elements of the cinema (camera, editing, music, sound) to play his audience. At the same time, he is also very sensitive to the simplest, most elemental means of achieving suspense. I have already mentioned The Blair Witch Project, and some of Signs’ most suspense-laden moments recall the Blair Witch device of having the camera simply looking out into darkness, while the audience suspense grows at the thought of what might be about to appear.