Signs came out during a precarious moment of cinematic history in the sometimes-fraught relationship between communities of faith and Hollywood. Following the release of The Last Temptation of Christ, a movie which critics loved and the Church at large hated, movies that openly addressed topics of faith with empathy and curiosity became few and far between. Many Christians stopped going to movies, assuming they would just have to keep rewatching their collection of Charlton Heston VHS tapes if they wanted a good uplifting work of cinema. The church and cinema had broken up – for a decade or so.
At the same time, a Biblical counselor turned author named John Eldredge was taking the publishing world by storm with his collection of spiritual non-fiction books that insisted that we are part of a greater story – God’s story. It spoke to a need to believe that we aren’t just cogs in a wheel. That God cares about each one of us and situated us to play an important part. The faith community lapped up these seemingly simple words like the sweetest water.
Into this desert of movies about faith, a filmmaker on the rise named M. Night Shyamalan dropped Signs in 2002, meeting the need and matching themes that John Eldredge had already primed the faith community to celebrate. Audiences bowled over by The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable were eager and willing to find out what he would do next. Ironically, Shyamalan’s second feature called Wide Awake was a very spiritual film, featuring a young Catholic schoolboy looking for evidence that God exists. The movie flopped. The Sixth Sense took off, and Shyamalan learned his lesson. He would thenceforth be a genre movie director.
A family drama inside of a science fiction wrapper, Signs features a lapsed Episcopal priest and widower who lives on a farm with his two kids and younger brother. They discover weird crop circles and realize along with the rest of the globe that their world is, indeed, being invaded by aliens. It can’t be underscored enough how important Signs felt at the time for people of faith who loved movies. Here was a popular filmmaker directing a movie starring Mel Gibson (still in the public’s good graces) and Joaquin Phoenix (becoming more popular every day after Gladiator) that openly shows characters talking about God and their struggles with faith. Sure, Father Graham Hess is angry at God and insists he hates God in one of the film’s most poignant scenes, but that just makes his character that much more relatable. And at that time, if you had a movie about a clergyman, he was probably a sexual predator or a trope to mock, Father Graham was neither of these things. He was a good man who felt abandoned by God.
Graham and his family come together as they try to figure out what’s going on and gird their loins once they know what’s coming. Gibson and Phoenix give the bedrock performances that make this film work, all under Shyamalan doing some of the best directing of his career. The film posits that in our lives, strange and mysterious things happen, and we don’t always see the hand of God orchestrating it all. Your broken dream may be the token that saves your family during a key moment. Your weird habit may become a weapon you can wield when all other protections fail. The brokenness you carry in your body may one day be the thing that keeps you alive.
Signs appeared on the first Arts & Faith top 100 in 2004 and fell by the wayside until its resurrection in 2025. Whether it will retain its place on the top 100 remains to be seen. Cinephiles may now write off Signs because of Gibson’s involvement or because they think the concept is cheesy, but I have a soft spot for Signs. At the time, its release gave me hope that representations of faith can still happen inside of quality cinema. And it gave Christians who had sworn off new movies a reason to give this relationship one more chance.
— Lindsey Dunn (2025)
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