On October 6, 1971, American infantryman Jacob Singer is with the
1st Air Cavalry Division, deployed in a village in Vietnam's
Mekong Delta, when his unit comes under attack. As many of Jacob's comrades are killed or wounded, others exhibit abnormal behavior with some suffering
catatonia,
convulsions, and
seizures. Jacob flees into the jungle and is stabbed with a bayonet. Jacob awakens on the
New York City Subway and glimpses a tentacle protruding from a sleeping homeless person. When he finds the subway station exit locked, he crosses the tracks and is almost hit by a train. The year is 1975; Jacob is a postal worker and lives in a rundown apartment in Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Jezebel. Jacob misses his old family and experiences visions of them, especially the youngest of his sons, Gabe, who had died in an accident before the war. Jacob is beset by disturbing experiences and apparitions, including glimpses of faceless vibrating figures, and narrowly escapes being run over by a pursuing car. He attempts to contact his regular doctor at the local
VA hospital but is informed that there is no record of him ever being a patient there and that his doctor has died in a car explosion. At a party thrown by friends, a psychic reads Jacob's palm and tells him that he is already dead, which Jacob dismisses as a joke. After declining to dance with her, he appears to witness an enormous creature dancing sexually with Jezebel before killing her; Jacob collapses. At home, Jacob experiences a dangerous fever, which Jezebel attempts to bring down with a painful ice bath. Jacob wakes up in another reality where he lives with his wife and sons, including Gabe. In Vietnam, a wounded Jacob is evacuated under fire in a helicopter, which is subsequently shot down. One of Jacob's former platoon mates, Paul, contacts him to reveal he is suffering from similar experiences. Shortly after, Paul is killed when his car explodes. Commiserating after the funeral, other surviving members of the platoon confess that they have all been experiencing horrifying hallucinations. Believing that they are suffering the effects of a military experiment performed on them without their knowledge or consent, they hire a lawyer to investigate. However, the lawyer quits the case after reading military files documenting that the soldiers were never in combat and were discharged for psychological reasons. Jacob's comrades back down, while Jacob suspects they have been threatened into doing so. Jacob is then abducted by suited men, who attempt to intimidate him. Jacob fights them and escapes but is injured and nearly paralyzed in the process. He is taken to a nightmarish hospital, where he is told he has been killed and this is his home, but his
chiropractor friend Louis comes to his rescue and heals him. Louis quotes the 14th-century Christian mystic
Meister Eckhart, who said that one must make peace with death to realise that the "devils tearing your life away" are instead "angels, freeing you from the earth". Jacob is approached by a distressed man who has been following him from a distance and who had dragged Jacob away from Paul's burning car. Introducing himself as Michael Newman, he tells a story of having been a chemist with
the Army's chemical warfare division where he designed a drug he called the Ladder, which massively increased aggression. Michael claims that to test the drug's effectiveness, a dose was secretly given to Jacob's unit before the battle, causing some of them to turn on each other in a homicidal frenzy. Michael's story triggers a vision of Jacob wounded in Vietnam, which shows his attacker as a fellow American soldier. Jacob returns to his family's home, where Gabe leads him up the staircase into a bright light. In a
triage tent in 1971, military medics declare Jacob dead, saying that he had fought to stay alive but now looks peaceful. ==Cast==