Edition: U.S. / Global

FILM; Mysticism, Miracles And Mush

Published: August 25, 2002

WHEN ''Signs,'' the fifth film by the 32-year-old box-office wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan, was released last month, Mr. Shyamalan became the subject of massive hype that labeled him a cinematic auteur worthy of comparison with Alfred Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg.

Because ''Signs'' shares with Mr. Shyamalan's two previous hits, ''The Sixth Sense'' and ''Unbreakable,'' a brooding, insular atmosphere and an obsession with the supernatural, it does indeed certify the director as an auteur, albeit one with a lowbrow sensibility. In all three movies, the dominant emotions are paranoia and a primal yearning for emotional and spiritual roots. Even the jokes (children donning aluminum-foil cone hats to ward off aliens, for instance) are freighted with metaphysical solemnity.

And in ''Signs,'' set almost entirely in and around an isolated farmhouse on the edge of a cornfield seething with menace, it is easy to admire Mr. Shyamalan's cool, Hitchcockian manipulation of suspense. A master of the protracted tease, he understands that unseen horror is scarier than any movie monster. In the bucolic normalcy of Bucks County, Pa., Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), a recently widowed farmer, barricades himself and his family inside their home against an alien invasion. Graham is a former priest who lost his faith after the death of his wife, and the movie's early scenes, in which he anxiously tries to rationalize the appearance of crop circles and other intimations of an extraterrestrial presence on his property, recall the tingly build-up to the violence in ''Psycho.''

As for the Spielberg connection, Mr. Shyamalan's portrayal of a hostile alien invasion suggests the dark antithesis of ''E.T.'' or ''Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' (by way of ''The War of the Worlds'' and ''The Day of the Triffids''). Also, both Mr. Spielberg and Mr. Shyamalan exalt the prescience of children. Morgan, the little boy in ''Signs,'' like Elliott in ''E.T.,'' is the first to intuit the presence of extraterrestrials, recognizing that the crop circles are not the elaborate hoax Graham keeps insisting they are.

But Mr. Shyamalan carries his cinematic influences into new territory. Where Hitchcock's menace was deployed in a spirit of cat-and-mouse playfulness and laced with flirtatious sex, Mr. Shyamalan's is infused with a grim sense of spiritual crisis, and the passion in his films is clinging and domestic. Moreover, issues of faith never much concerned Hitchcock. But in ''Signs'' Graham, even after losing his religion, still divides the world into believers and nonbelievers, and the movie makes a big mushy point of being on the side of the believers.

Where Mr. Spielberg's films celebrate children's capacity for wonder, Mr. Shyamalan's go much further, investing children with an aura of holiness. His visionary moppets are vehicles for promoting the kind of mysticism psychotherapists call ''magical thinking.'' In ''The Sixth Sense,'' the mind of a troubled child becomes a portal into the afterlife. In ''Unbreakable,'' an adoring son coaxes his father into realizing his own superheroic potential.

The exploitation of magical thinking in mass entertainment -- the ''touched by an angel'' syndrome -- triggers an almost allergic reaction in me. It strikes me as a sentimental palliative that encourages people to wallow in passivity and wait for miracles instead of doing for themselves. As much as I admired the craft behind the whopper ending of ''The Sixth Sense,'' that movie left me feeling manipulated by a spiritual huckster. And so does ''Signs.''

''Signs'' also plays disturbingly (and perhaps exploitatively) on the events of Sept. 11 and the weeks afterward, when imminent Armageddon seemed a real possibility to many Americans. One of the aliens' weapons seems a deliberate reference to the anthrax scare.

Mr. Shyamalan, like Hitchcock, does cameos in his own films. And in ''Signs,'' he portrays the driver who fell asleep at the wheel and accidentally struck down Graham's wife. At first glimpse, the driver suggests a swarthy, glowering, crypto-terrorist. Having cast himself as a similarly suspicious character in ''Unbreakable,'' Mr. Shyamalan, who is of Indian heritage, seems to be commenting on cultural xenophobia and the dangers of scapegoating those who look out of place in the American heartland.

But this is a side issue in ''Signs.'' The crux of the movie is Mr. Shyamalan's fascination with faith and miracles. The director was born in India, into a Hindu family. After their arrival in the United States, he attended Catholic schools. In interviews he has claimed not to be religious. Is that why the movie's supernatural glow, for all its intensity, feels so synthetic?

''Signs,'' unlike ''The Sixth Sense,'' grinds to a shallow, thudding conclusion. When an alien is finally pictured, this faceless leaping figure is about as scary as the Jolly Green Giant. And when Graham's faith is restored by an instant miracle, the imagery deployed by the director plays shamelessly on the Pietà.

Until this point, ''Signs'' has toyed provocatively with the notion that the alien invasion might be one frightened, isolated family's shared hallucination. How much deeper and more challenging ''Signs'' might have been had the extraterrestrials been depicted as possibly delusional blips -- leaving some doubt as to their actual existence. Had ''Signs'' resisted putting on the final angelic touch and showing its little green men, it might have offered us a mystery worth contemplating about the relationship between faith and fantasy.

Photo: Rory Culkin, Mel Gibson, center, Abigail Breslin and Joaquin Phoenix in M. Night Shyamalan's ''Signs.'' (Frank Masi/Touchstone Pictures)