Every once in a while, Hollywood surprises you and brings forth a gem from its hidden depths. In the midst of so much eye-candy and depravity (Austin Powers, anyone?), such gems blindside you – unexpected, and always enjoyed. And when a director starts hammering out these gems one after another, you sit up and take notice.

M. Night Shyamalan shocked the world with The Sixth Sense – the first movie he made to receive widespread publicity. The spinning of complex relationships, old-fashioned horror, and one of the best climaxes ever resulted in $700 million in sales worldwide. His movies broke the mold of the slasher films generally referred to as “horror” by focusing in on characters and the ideas behind them (gasp!) instead of on blood and gore. He showed how, with a minimum of special effects, we could be scared as much by a breath or a camera angle as anything Scream had to offer.

For a start, the man knows film. Each medium – whether it’s storytelling, books, plays, or anything – has distinct strengths. Each can be used to show different aspects of truth (or falsehood, for that matter). Shyamalan draws on the strengths of film, and shows himself a master of communication. His films are understated, pushing away the glitter of most horror or sci-fi films. He has no problem with using silence when weaker men would throw in witty filler. He has no horror of long conversations, either – if they show a side to his characters, if they can pull us into his ideas, he uses them.

And that’s the wonderful thing - Shyamalan’s films are about the characters. Even in Unbreakable, which failed to do as well as The Sixth Sense, the people he portrays redeem the film. Slowly he takes you into a character’s mind, into his home, into everything he loves and everything he hates – till you are hooked and couldn’t turn off the TV even if you wanted to. The way he writes and films the interaction between family members is realistic enough to make you feel as if it were happening to your neighbors, and you simply watched through binoculars in your bedroom window. The characters laugh and fight and love and break your heart as if they were people you knew and cared about.

The shots and camera angles are quite fascinating to analyze. He uses reflections in mirrors and on television screens to make us think about what we’re seeing – he doesn’t simply present the scenes, but gives them to us as a puzzle to work out. And he manages to pull it off without alienating the audience, a feat many avant-garde filmmakers (Dogme 95 (http://www.dogme95.dk) comes to mind) have failed to perform.

His sense of providence is another aspect of his films rarely found in Hollywood today. God is always present in a film – and the director communicates God the way he sees Him. He may say everything is up to chance, he may portray God as a malicious trickster, but some version of God is always there. In Shyamalan’s films, God is a personal God, shaping events that may seem evil from our point of view to accomplish something good in the end.

Signs, his latest offering, uses this concept as its overarching theme. “You just have to ask yourself what kind of person are you,” Graham Hess tells his brother in one scene. “Are you the type that sees signs? Sees miracles? Or do you think that people just get lucky? Maybe there are no coincidences.” Hess considers himself the latter – but God has other plans. Shyamalan’s representation of God is mature and orthodox. He doesn’t let himself get sidetracked by questions of “How could a loving God do such-and-such?” He shows us that, if we could only get beyond our limited point of view, everything happens for a purpose.

The effect is spoiled somewhat when Shyamalan defines his views of God: “Faith is something very different than religion for me,” he tells the LA Times (http://www.la.com/film/articles/0702/28/film01.asp). “Religion is some group saying their particular version of God is the right version, and that’s hard for me to accept. The world has become such a smaller place. It makes it hard for me to believe that the guy in Nepal and the little boy in Africa and the old man in Maine, all three of them with different versions of God, and yet maybe none of them are right. I just can’t believe that. There has to be some unifying thing.”

But there is a unifying thing – the image of the one true God is imprinted on everyone. On some people, it’s buried deep. On others, it shines wonderfully no matter what the intentions of the bearer are. Shyamalan is just that way. He gives us insights into the ways of providence and the ways we deal with faith, and for that alone his films are worth watching. Shyamalan may have a rather amorphous view of faith, but God has other plans.

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Tim Eaton edits Chasing Hats and currently lives in New Hampshire. It took him forever to discover that Shyamalan is actually pronounced SHAW-ma-lan. Don’t hold it against him.