Ray Ferrier is a dock worker who is finishing a night of work in the morning, because he works the night shift. But when he gets home his young daughter Rachel and teenage son Robbie are staying with him at his house in Bayonne, New Jersey, while his pregnant ex-wife Mary Anne and her new husband Tim visit her parents in Boston for the weekend. But then the unthinkable and, ultimately, the unexpected happens to him in an extraordinary sense! Witnessing, and barely escaping the horror, first-hand, it’s up to Ray to protect his two kids from terrorist and races up to Boston before one of them gets murdered by a large tripod machine in its path!

Bill Parrish, media tycoon, loving father and still a human being, is about to celebrate his 65th birthday. One morning, he is contacted by the Inevitable - by hallucination, as he thinks. Later, Death itself enters his home and his life, personified in a man’s body: Joe Black has arrived. His intention was to take Bill with him, but accidentally, Joe’s former host and Bills beautiful daughter Susan have already met. Joe begins to develop certain interest in life on earth as well as in Susan, who has no clue who she’s flirting with.

After her mother dies from a methadone overdose, Jeliza-Rose is taken from the big city to a rural farmhouse by her father. As she tries to settle into a new life in a house her father had purchased for his now-deceased mother, Jeliza-Rose’s attempts to deal with what’s happened result in increasingly odd behavior, as she begins to communicate mainly with her bodiless Barbie doll heads and Dell, a neighborhood woman who always wears a beekeeper’s veil.