Former preacher Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), still grieving over the accidental death of his wife, discovers crop circles in the cornfield that surrounds his rural home in Pennsylvania. He dismisses them as a hoax, but when Graham and his brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix), a former minor league baseball player who has moved into the house to help Graham raise his children, see a shadowy figure on the roof of the house and Graham later sees a thin green leg sticking out of the cornfield, he begins to believe his family is under threat. Eventually, he meets the man who accidentally killed his wife, who informs him that he has an alien trapped in his pantry. In a dazzling scene — that took more than three weeks to film — Graham spies the monster under the pantry door and cuts two of its fingers off. The family decides to stay at home rather than flee and eventually comes face to face with the enemies. Signs is vivid proof that you don’t need CGI to create an absolutely chilling story, and grossing more than $400,000,000 in global box office receipts, it remains one of director M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest films.
