In 1999, pretty much out of nowhere, M. Night Shyamalan hit the American movie scene with the kind of blinding flash that does not appear often in Hollywood. Super-hit movies come along with regularity, but not usually by boy wonders, and not since the days of Spielberg and Lucas has anyone splashed quite so large as Shyamalan. At age 29, he wrote and directed 1999's huge surprise, The Sixth Sense, a pretty low-budget word-of-mouth film that made about a quarter of a billion dollars in pure profit, outdone only by the original Star Wars. And that was just in the theaters stateside. Full-grown, well-educated adults went to see the film, an elegant and very creepy ghost story, over and over again, even talking it up to innocent bystanders in places like church.

In 2001 came the much-anticipated Unbreakable, again written as well as directed by Shyamalan and starring two of Hollywood's biggest actors, Samuel L. Jackson and Bruce Willis (Willis had the lead role in The Sixth Sense). Unbreakable was also eerie, albeit only moderately, the story of a middle-aged security guard who comes to the realization that he is, in fact, to his astonishment, a comic-book style superhero, "Security Man" or something like that. Slow and a bit clunky, and the miscasting of Jackson, did not help the film, but a lot of people still went to see it (almost $100 million in domestic box-office alone) simply because it was made by the fellow who did The Sixth Sense. And now Signs.

Premise: An ex-Episcopal priest who lost his faith when his wife died regains it in the midst of a global attack by aliens. Humans know something strange is afoot because numerous large and elaborate crop circles are showing up simultaneously all around the globe—for instance, in the priest-turned-farmer's cornfields in Bucks County, Pennsylvania (45 miles from Philadelphia, the director's hometown, in which he determinedly still lives). For the befuddled earthlings, the circles are "signs" of some sort, portents of strange things to come, like the end of the world. For the aliens, they are simply and only signs, navigational markers for their impending invasion.

Of course, viewers don't learn all of this till far into the film, and that slow road to knowledge makes for a good deal of suspense, stoked by isolation: virtually the entire story takes place on the ex-minister's farm. He and his family are alone, although they can count on the ready compassion of the local female sheriff's deputy (played wonderfully by Cherry Jones). Besides father Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), there are his two young children, ten-year-old son Morgan (Rory Culkin) and five-year-old daughter Bo (Abigail Breslin), and Graham's younger brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a washed-up baseball slugger who's moved in with the widower to help raise the kids.

Ex-priest Hess is neither particularly intellectual nor talkative, but he does care intensely about people, especially his family. When his wife, Colleen, died gruesomely in a freakish auto accident, the utter meaninglessness of the tragedy shredded his faith. The vicious caprice of the event was aggravated by the silliness of her last words (shown in flashback), the punch line—so it seems—to a cruel cosmic joke. When the very hostile alien invasion gets up close and personal, Hess half prays to and half defies the God he no longer believes: please, don't take my children, too.

So does the loving God above make things work for the good of his people, or is he just like those venomous aliens, also from the sky, who come to prey? The answer is spelled out at the very end of the story, when Colleen's grotesquely incongruous parting words turn out to be efficacious signs, providing the means to extricate the family from the alien peril. Wow, and pazaam. That death was no accident; wife died to save family, although by a means no one would ever have foreseen. In fact, most of the hard things in Hess's life turn out to be "for the good."

Enlightened reviewers threw a pout, and even after the reviews were in, The New York Times and The Washington Post both felt compelled to return to the film, shaking with disgust, and perform a kind of reverse exorcism. "Mysticsm, Miracles, and Mush," Stephen Holden's piece in the Times was headed. But satisfying as it might be to see the heathen rage, one has to ask how the deity of Signs is related, or not, to the God of the Old and New Testament.

Shyamalan's own religious background is complex. He's the son of Hindu parents (the initial M. in his name is for Manoj, another name for the Hindu god Vishnu), but his early education fell to the posh Roman Catholic and Episcopal private schools of Philadelphia (both parents are physicians, as are most of the aunts and uncles). His second film, the low-budget but charming and provocative Wide Awake (1998), tells the very autobiographical story of a fifth-grade boy (Joseph Cross) who goes on a year-long quest to meet God after his loving grandfather (Robert Loggia) dies of bone marrow cancer. Shyamalan even titles one of film's chapters "signs." The boy's purpose in contacting God is to find out if his devout Catholic grandfather is OK, wherever he is. Overall, it's a winsome portrait of Catholicism (Rosie O'Donnell plays a very savvy, baseball loving nun), although a few critics excoriated the film.

Young Josh does find signs, plausible ones, ranging from a surprise snowfall in whose beauty his grandfather said God dwells to his own sudden acute awareness, "wide awake," of the complexity, sorrow, and beauty of the world. There are other signs also—the sudden embrace of belief by his best friend after a fortuitous rescue and, ending the film, a cryptic message from a mysterious school companion that all is well. Small odd things happen, and the world never seems the same again, thank God.

It is this sort of awareness that informs Shyamalan's next two films, the blockbuster Sixth Sense and the relative bust, Unbreakable. There are two shocks in the first film: that the young boy protagonist (Haley Joel Osment) really does see ghosts, and that the child psychiatrist who tries to help him throughout (Bruce Willis) is a ghost, a recognition that comes as a huge surprise to the audience and to the psychiatrist. Unbreakable delivers the same jolt—the security guard is indeed that superhero, and a scientifically plausible one at that. (In a deleted scene, the hero-to-be disputes with a priest about the providential import of surviving a train wreck.) Shyamalan has commented in an interview (on the DVD of Unbreakable) that he seeks to make "feature-length Twilight Zones" where something happens at the end, a perceptual trick or plot flip, overturning the commonsense reductionism of everyday life. Here the writer clearly ventures into the heavy waters of epistemology, expectation, metaphor, and providence—the same thematic terrain, however different the story settings, traversed by Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and the like. And yet when all is said and done, it is still hard to tell how serious this young, and scarily smart, God-haunted writer-director is about ghosts, superheroes, angels-in-disguise, and mysterious deathbed providences.

Truth is, Shyamalan is not alone in these preoccupations. This sort of thing crops up regularly in Hollywood, and not just among the usual suspects like Spielberg, Schrader, and Lucas. Others have wondered about providence as well. Laurence Kasdan's Grand Canyon (1991) spins a long tale about the way a superintending Providence rescues and brings together a diverse lot of Los Angelinos. Young P. T. Anderson's truly amazing, harrowing three-hour Magnolia (1999) hangs on the very question of the plausibility of strange providences, including a frog storm, that both judge and heal a tear-sodden world. In short, there seems these days to be something in the wind, an inclination to find God lurking about in the stranger events of individual lives. In "Penitent" on her recent Songs in Red and Gray (2001), folkie Suzanne Vega pitches the question just about right:

Looking for your fingerprints
I find them in coincidence,
And make my faith to grow.

These moviemakers tend not to be pollyannish but painfully aware of how dire life can get, and they ask the hardest questions to test out the curiosities of how God might just show up in the strangest places doing the most peculiar things. The difficulty in Signs is the implication that God does nasty stuff to people, like alien invasions and traffic deaths, just so he can show off. As such, fine filmmaking though it is, Signs is a lengthy sci-fi detour on behalf of a minor and very dubious theological point.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. His book Catching Light: Looking for God in Film is forthcoming from Eerdmans.

Copyright © 2002 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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