It's barely over an hour and a half this film, but it seems much longer. Mel Gibson ("Graham") is a widowed former pastor who lives on a farm with his two kids "Morgan" (Rory Culkin) and "Bo" (Abigail Breslin) and his brother "Merrill" (Joaquin Phoenix). Their lives are all rolling along normally until one morning they discover some crop circles amongst the corn fields. Dismissing them as hoaxes, they are intrigued when television reports suggest a proliferation of these things all around the world. Now add to their now heightened suspicions some late night noises and mysterious happenings, and the family begin to suspect that they are being watched - and that their observer is not exactly benign. The last ten minutes or so redeem this story to a degree, but for the most part it is a terribly slow burn of a film. There isn't really much by way of action; Gibson and Phoenix don't really exude much of a compelling sibling relationship and the kids - usually a crucial conduit for M. Night Shyamalan stories have much less to work with here. This has more of the melodrama to it - the backstory of tragedy and grief all gets in the way of the gradually increasing sense of menace and I found the whole momentum of the story quite staccato. This is an adequate film, but it is definitely nobody's best work.
