Signs (2002)

Grief can shake a person's faith to its foundations, until something extraordinary forces him to ask whether anything happens by chance. M. Night Shyamalan's "Signs" stars Mel Gibson as Graham Hess, a former Episcopal minister who abandoned his faith after his wife died in a tragic accident. Now living on a farm in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, with his younger brother, Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a former minor-league baseball player, and his two young children, Morgan (Rory Culkin) and Bo (Abigail Breslin), Graham awakens one morning to find a gigantic crop circle carved into his cornfield. As similar patterns appear around the globe, followed by mysterious lights in the sky, a media frenzy erupts, and the family barricades itself in the farmhouse as the strange events draw closer. Graham begins to wonder whether they're random events or signs of something more. With echoes of "The War of the Worlds," Shyamalan crafts a suspenseful chiller, and he appears in a small role himself.