The film starts at Norm’s Diner. A man in a clear trenchcoat (Sam Rockwell) who is strapped to some sort of device comes to tell the patrons that the world is about to end, and he needs to recruit a team of strangers to help him on his mission. He explains that he has arrived at that diner 117 times and went through different combinations of people, and all have failed.
The Man From The Future recruits a couple, Mark and Janet (Michael Peña and Zazie Beetz), a mother named Susan (Juno Temple), plus other bystanders named Bob (Daniel Barnett), Marie (Georgia Goodman), and Scott (Asim Chaudry). A young woman named Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson) volunteers to join, but The Man doesn’t want her to come, until he changes his mind because he’s “feeling weird tonight”. The team then leaves the diner and heads out on the mission.
MARK AND JANET
A few days earlier, Mark and Janet are shown as being high school teachers. Mark tries to maintain his students’ attention, but they are all stuck on their phones. He complains about this to Janet and the other teachers, but they tell him not to worry so much about it. The students and staff then have to stay in the school’s bunker as word of a school shooting breaks out. Mark tries to defend a teacher from one nasty student, but she comes close to verbally destroying him before the people are allowed to return to class.
Soon, the students all become mind-controlled by an app on their phones with a pyramid symbol. Mark tries to get a student’s attention, but they all start moving toward him like zombies. He hides in the teacher’s lounge, but the students quickly break through the door. Mark and Janet run to a classroom and use hidden guns that fire electromagnetic waves that only briefly stop the phone signals and snap the students out, but they resume being zombified, and Mark and Janet flee the school.
Back in the present, the Man From The Future is leading everyone out of an exit, but the streets are already swarmed with cops and armed officials. The Man knows that Bob is carrying a gun and was planning to use it on him to be a hero, but he convinces Bob to go out into the street first. This results in Bob getting shot to death. The others then find a hidden hatch in the floor and sneak out through there to leave the building undetected. The Man says that their goal is to find a nine-year-old boy who is going to create the AI that will destroy the world.
SUSAN
A flashback shows that Susan’s son Darren was killed in the school shooting. Utterly devastated and shaken, Susan is approached by a group of moms who have already lost their children in previous shootings. Susan is made to sign some paperwork and goes to a facility where she is informed that they can clone Darren, though he may not come back exactly as Susan knew him. Although hesitant, Susan ultimately goes through with it.
Darren returns as somewhat drone-like and not how Susan remembers him. She goes to a party with other parents who have cloned their dead kids, and is even stunned to learn that one couple cloned their kid four times and are totally nonchalant about it.
A grieving father approaches Susan and gives her a card with a number on it. She is directed to a line that allows her to communicate with who she thinks is the real Darren over the phone.
Present – The group are pursued through a parking garage by two masked gunmen wearing pig masks. Marie gets shot to death, and the others make a run for it since the zombie students are making their way into the building as well. The remaining team members hide and are slightly saved when one of the gunmen is killed because their car wasn’t properly parked and rolled down the incline, crushing the gunmen. The car then breaks through the barrier, and The Man protects Ingrid from being crushed by the car.
INGRID
We go back to Ingrid’s childhood, where she was diagnosed with an unusual allergy to electronics and anything with a wi-fi signal. This caused her to have issues growing up. As an adult, the best job she can get is working birthday parties as a generic princess. She forms a relationship with a delivery driver named Tim (Tom Taylor) since he doesn’t use cell phones.
Eventually, Tim becomes detached from the relationship due to being addicted to a virtual reality simulator. He spends hours on it, and Ingrid finds him gorging on food in the middle of the night after finally disconnecting. Later on, Tim announces to Ingrid that he is leaving her to be part of a simulated reality for the rest of his life. Ingrid later quits her job after suffering a heavy nosebleed during a birthday party because multiple girls were using their phones. This is why she is seen wearing a princess dress in the beginning.
Back in the present, the survivors put on protective gear to continue their mission. A flashback to The Man’s childhood is shown, involving his connection to the AI. His mother tried to hide him from it, but the AI found their home and destroyed it, killing The Man’s mother and kickstarting his lifelong mission. The group is found by the other gunman, who is pissed that his friend was killed and reveals that they were paid to go after The Man and anybody associated with him. The Man tries to talk him down, almost getting through to him, but Scott ruins the moment by hitting the gunman with a car.
As the team gets closer to their destination, the mind-controlled teens start to swarm them. Mark and Janet take their EMP guns and try to draw the mob away from everyone else by driving away. On the streets, the remaining group encounter what looks like a giant cat monster devouring the teens off the street, another creation of the AI.
The Man, Ingrid, Susan, and Scott locate the boy’s house and speak to two people who are believed to be his parents. The Man quickly figures out that there’s something off about them and that they may have been hired. He is proven right when the “dad” stabs Scott in the neck with a cooking thermometer, and The Man blasts the fake dad into the wall. The panicking “mom” tells the group he’s upstairs before she flees. They find nothing but see a Roomba going into a hidden space behind the wall.
The three discover the boy (Artie Wilkinson-Hunt) as he is in the process of developing the AI. The Man tries to use a drive to spread a virus into the AI and shut it down, but Susan tells him to use “Darren” to plug into the AI because that’s what the voice is telling her to do. This happens, and the AI uses the boy’s robots and electronics to attack. Ingrid tries to fight back against her allergy as she enters the room with wires and robotics, and she takes the drive before The Man can detonate what he is strapped to.
The AI uses the boy to freeze time and speak to Ingrid. It reveals that she is The Man’s mother, which explains why he was so protective of her throughout the evening. The AI is responsible for the app that mind-controlled the teens, hiring the gunmen to go after The Man, the fake voices of dead kids like Darren, and the virtual reality simulation that Tim became obsessed with. It also knows that The Man did not inherit her tech allergy and states that even if she were to stick the virus in the AI’s system, it would only delay the inevitable since it will be created no matter what. It suggests to her that she just join the simulated reality like Tim did. Ingrid decides she will be proud of her future son and declares “fuck your future” and plugs the virus into the system, shutting everything down.
The Man, Ingrid, and Susan go out into the street, where it seems like everything went back to normal. Mark and Janet survived, the teens are no longer mind-controlled, and Darren appears like his old self to Susan. However, The Man soon figures out something he predicted earlier, which is that they are currently stuck in an AI simulation that it wanted them to be trapped in. This becomes clear to Ingrid when she sees the boy and a dog telling her “Good luck. Have fun. Don’t die.” The Man detonates his device, which only sends him back in time instead of setting off a bomb. Ingrid is then taken away in an ambulance while raving hysterically, and Mark gets eaten by the cat monster.
The Man then returns to the start of the evening, but he goes directly to Ingrid first. He decides that his idea of injecting the AI with a virus was a stupid idea, so he has a new idea, which is to infect everybody with Ingrid’s allergy. He takes her hand and then makes his big speech to the whole diner, starting the night over anew.[wide]
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