This is one seriously strange movie. It co-stars three actors you may know (William Hurt, Kiefer Sutherland and Jennifer Connelly) but most of the rest of the cast including the protagonist aren’t familiar names. It starts out as a film noir with a murder mystery and a man with amnesia. But then it starts getting very weird and keeps getting weirder right up to the final scene.
(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)
John Murdoch (played by Rufus Sewell) wakes up in a bathtub in a hotel room that also contains the body of a call girl who has been murdered and her body carved on by a maniac. Murdoch has no memory of who he is. He hears the phone ring and picks it up. A man calling himself Dr. Schreber tells Murdoch that he can explain what is happening to him but that he must leave immediately because “they” are coming to get him. So, he runs away and finds out that the police are looking for him for a string of women’s murders. And then he meets them; the Strangers. They’re tall, thin bald men who look slightly inhuman and have telekinetic powers. And Murdoch finds out that he also has these powers.
Police Inspector Frank Bumstead (played by William Hurt) is hunting Murdoch and he interviews his wife Emma (played by Jennifer Connelly). She claims Murdoch couldn’t be the killer. Bumstead uses Emma to find Murdoch. But he escapes. By the end of the movie Murdoch is caught by the police but he eventually convinces Bumstead that the world they live in is a simulation because of anomalies like the lack of daylight and false memories of places like Shell Beach which do not actually exist.
Eventually the Strangers come to Dr. Schreber and demand that he inject Murdoch with new memories to solve his problem. It’s obvious that Schreber works for the Strangers but he seems a reluctant partner.
Over the course of the movie what we learn is that the Strangers have built the city to study humans. They are an alien race that has kidnapped humans and housed them in a city that is never in daylight but always night. They have Schreber inject them with their false identities and every midnight they render the whole city asleep and then “tune” it by modifying the physical landscape (buildings appear and disappear) and people are given new identities or altered memories.
The Strangers are trying to understand the human “soul.” Apparently, their race is dying out and becoming more human is their solution to survival. At the end of the movie we find out the city is a construct floating in interstellar space completely separate from Earth. There is a final showdown between the Strangers and Murdoch and he destroys them and takes control of the city. In the final scene he meets up with his “wife” who now has new memories that don’t include him and he strikes up a conversation. And they head for the mythical Shell Beach where his false memories told him he had led a happy boyhood life. Only now he has created it and brought out the sun to end the endless night.
This is some strange movie. The film noir atmosphere of the beginning of the movie is quite well done. The transition to a science fiction theme is somewhat jarring but interesting. I’m not sure I’d characterize the whole experimental scenario with the Strangers altering the city and its inhabitants every midnight as a reasonable plot. I guess it’s almost like the delusion of someone with extreme paranoia except that the paranoia is based in fact. All in all, I’d say it’s a bit overdone. But I didn’t hate it. As far as a recommendation, I’d have to say most people would be looking at a fifty/fifty shot at liking it.