Graham Hess is a former Episcopal priest who has lost his faith and left his church because his wife Colleen was killed in a horrible car accident while walking one night. His brother, Merrill, has moved in with him on his farm in Pennsylvania, to help him take care of his two kids, Morgan and Bo.

As the movie progresses, we learn more about each of these four people. Graham is bitter and has completely rejected God. At one point he tells Merrill that “we are all alone – there is no one watching out for us.” The seeming randomness and brutality of the way his wife died – hit by a car when she was walking one night – has made him think that a good God cannot possibly exist. As a result of his wife’s death, Graham has become an unhappy man, and one who seems to have alienated his children somewhat, especially his son Morgan. Theirs is not a happy household – there is no laughter or joy in it.

Merrill has come to live on the farm in order to try to help out, but he doesn’t really think that it’s working. Merrill too has fallen from better days – he used to be a star minor league baseball player, who set the record for longest home run. However, he also set the record for strikeouts because he swung at every pitch – “it just felt wrong not to swing” he says at one point.

Morgan and Bo are clearly deeply hurt by the loss of their mother and the sadness and loss of faith of their father. Morgan suffers from asthma, and Bo has an odd practice of leaving glasses of water around the house unfinished because she thinks there’s something wrong with the water.

One day, a mysterious crop circle appears in Graham’s corn field. That night, the farm gets a mysterious visitor, whom Graham and Merrill chase without being able to see it. However, whatever the thing is, it escapes – clearly it is extremely strong, and possesses some kind of camouflage ability.

More strange things keep happening. Morgan has started using Bo’s old baby monitor as a walkie-talkie, and it begins picking up strange signals. Morgan has become convinced that aliens are visiting. Graham and Merrill try to convince him otherwise, but that night Graham once again encounters a mysterious visitor in the cornfield. All he is able to see of it is a green leg.

Further, on the news, there are pictures of bright lights in the sky – visitors from outer space. Are they hostile or are they friendly? Graham and Merrill discuss the lights, and Graham tells Merrill that there is no one watching out for them – whatever those lights mean, they are all on their own.

And then the next day, he receives a strange phone call from Ray Reddy, the man who killed his wife. He drives to visit him, and finds out that Ray has been attacked by an alien, but has trapped it in the storage room. Graham goes to take a look, and an arm lashes out to grab him. He cuts off the fingers of the green hand with a knife.

Meanwhile, Merrill has been watching TV and sees video footage of an alien at a children’s birthday party in Brazil. Graham returns and suggests that they leave the house and go closer to water, because of Ray’s theory that the aliens don’t like water. However, Merrill and the children don’t want to leave, so they decide to stay and board up all the windows and doors in the house to wait things out.

That night the aliens do indeed come, and suddenly Graham and Merrill realize that they forgot to board up the attic door. The four of them rush downstairs into the basement and barricade the door. However, there was an old coal chute leading into the basement, and one alien grabs hold of Morgan through it. They fight off the alien and barricade the chute, but the fright gives Morgan an asthma attack – and they have left his inhaler upstairs. Graham, terrified that he is about to lose Morgan too, berates God, saying that he hates Him.

Morning comes, and over the radio they hear that the aliens are leaving because a means of fighting them has been discovered. They go back upstairs. Suddenly, an alien appears – the very same alien that had been in Ray’s storage room. It grabs Morgan and begins to spray poison into his face.

Now Graham has a flashback to his wife’s death. Her final words had been “Tell Merrill to swing away.” Earlier, in his talk with Merrill, Graham had used this as proof that God didn’t exist, because at the moment of her death, some random memory of being at one of Merrill’s baseball games had come into Colleen’s head. But now it gives Graham an idea – he tells Merrill to “swing away”. Merrill grabs his baseball bat from the wall and attacks the alien. In doing so, he knocks over some of Bo’s glasses of water, and they spray on the alien. The alien recoils – water is its weakness. Merrill continues to fight the alien, knocking it over. Water from Bo’s glasses pours onto its face and it dies.

Meanwhile, Graham has grabbed Morgan and run outside. He plunges the EpiPen into Morgan’s leg, and is praying that the asthma has kept the poison from entering Morgan’s lungs. Morgan finally opens his eyes and asks, “Dad? Did someone save me?” Overwhelmed with emotion, Graham replies “Yes, I think Someone did.”

The movie ends with a shot of Graham, with his priestly collar back on. We can hear the children laughing downstairs – the first time in the movie that the sounds of joy have been heard in the house. Graham has found his faith and his family again, both through the alien invasion.

Analysis

Why does God let bad things happen to good people? This is the question that Graham can’t answer, and which leads him away from faith. If God is good, why does bad stuff happen? But if God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he stop bad stuff from happening?

The answer is never a simple or easy-to-understand one – it can only be understood through suffering. Christ on the cross is the supreme example. And in this movie, it is through the suffering of one family in the event of an alien invasion that the answer to the question is found – God has a purpose in all things, even if we don’t understand it at the time. Sometimes things we thought were little meaningless moments in life can end up having the most important impact.

Think about the Gospel story of Tabitha – a father’s daughter dies. Does he lose faith? No. Does he understand? No. But he trusts and believes, and as a result, what looked like a cruel moment in a random world becomes his opportunity to meet Jesus. Jesus meets us especially in our moments of pain, and when he seems farthest away, he is actually closest.

This is ultimately the message of Signs. “Signs” refers on the surface to the crop circles. But really, the “signs” are those things in the movie that are signs of God’s presence. We as human beings need to learn to read those signs – Graham offers the only two ways we can read what happens in the world. Either people just get lucky, or there is some meaning behind it all. Our growth in holiness requires that we become better at reading the signs, at seeing behind the little, ordinary things that happen every day the hand of a loving Father who has a plan for us. Nothing escapes God – He has everything under control.

Ultimately, then, Graham needs to learn to properly read the signs God is giving him. At first, Graham reads all the signs in the first way – seeing behind them nothing but random events. His wife’s death, Morgan’s asthma, Bo’s strange obsession with her water being undrinkable, his wife’s seemingly random final words, the alien invasion itself – all of this seems nothing more than random events to Graham. He is able to discern no divine plan behind them, because he has lost his faith in God’s loving providence.

However, his faith is restored once his eyes are opened and he sees and learns to read clearly the true meaning of things – once he learns to read God’s plan behind every seemingly random event of each day. And ultimately, the purpose of all these little events turns out to be Graham’s conversion. God sees the big picture. He saw how Morgan’s asthma and Bo’s strange obsession, which they have had all their lives, would factor in and be important parts of Graham’s conversion. Even Graham’s wife’s death, tragic as it is, becomes a vehicle for God’s grace.

This, then, is the main point of the movie – that signs and miracles do exist. Nothing is random because everything is foreseen and a part of God’s plan. And by faith we learn to discern God’s presence, even if we don’t understand it, just as Graham could not understand how God could be present in the death of his wife. Ultimately, it is only through suffering that his faith is restored and he is able to read the signs that point to a loving Father.

Questions

1. Think of times in your own life where God seemed distant and events seemed random and meaningless. Did you lose faith? Were you able to see God even in the most difficult times in your life?

Perhaps this one is better as a reflection rather than an actual question to discuss.

2. Is this a movie about aliens? Or are the aliens actually there for a different reason?

The point of the aliens is entirely to bring Graham back to the faith. It is only through the alien invasion that the other seemingly random moments in Graham’s life can come together and turn out to have meaning, which shows him that there has been purpose in his life all along.

3. Is it silly to think that God could have a plan even for asthma or a strange tic like Bo’s? Is it harder to see God in big tragedies like the death of Graham’s wife, or in little, unimportant things like asthma and Bo’s obsession?

Signs. (2002). The Movie Database (TMDb). https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/2675-signs