After his car breaks down, Glen spends one hell of an odd night with a married couple, setting into motion a chain of events that alter their lives plus those of several random strangers.
On a rainy night, Glen's car runs over a spike strip. He seeks refuge in the nearby home of married couple Art and Cyndi. Art invites him to spend the night and persuades him to sleep with Cyndi, since Art's antidepressants have largely ruined his own intimacy with her. Some time later, Art inexplicably shows up at Glen's apartment and reveals to him that Cyndi is pregnant. Art implores Glen to pursue his relationship with Cyndi and to consider being a father to her child. At the same time, Cyndi decides to leave Art and move in with Glen. Months later, while preparing to go to the hospital, Glen and a very pregnant Cyndi are kidnapped by two men who had secretly been recording their conversations since Cyndi first moved in.
Shortly thereafter, Cyndi and Glen (who is now paralyzed) are patients in a psychiatric research facility, unaware of each other's fates after the kidnapping. Newly-hired Dr. Shannon works with both under the guidance of lead researcher Dr. Conners, who is developing hypnotic therapy technology using high-pitched audio frequencies. During their therapy sessions, Dr. Shannon and Glen role play his and Cyndi's previous interactions while Dr. Connors observes and plays various frequencies over the audio system. The medical team promises Glen that these activities will eventually allow him to overcome his paralysis. Dr. Shannon also works with Cyndi, revealing to her that Art is not actually her husband. He is a hypnotist who performed at her high school when she was 17. He used her as a subject and, when she proved to be particularly susceptible, put her into a permanent delusion that he was her English teacher, on whom she had a crush, ultimately leading to their marriage when she was 19.
Private conversations between Dr. Shannon and Dr. Connors reveal that Art had originally been Dr. Connors' partner, but suffered a mental breakdown and split off to pursue their research on his own. He used his hypnosis stage-act to identify susceptible individuals for his experiments. After discovering Glen during a wedding performance, he hypnotically induced the relationship between Glen and Cyndi, as well as their false perception that Cyndi was pregnant. Dr. Connors' team kidnapped the two so that they could reverse engineer the work Art had done on them, help them regain their original memories, and use the knowledge to positively impact society.
However, during a demonstration to military investors, Dr. Connors reveals that Glen's paralysis is actually a hypnotic suggestion which his team induced and which they can turn on and off with sound. He proposes this as a method for prisoner control. Outraged, Dr. Shannon, who did not realize her efforts were being used in this way, helps Glen and Cyndi escape the facility, though Glen remains partly under the original hypnotic delusions induced by Art.
In a secondary plotline, aspiring senator Alex Harris has begun an extra-martial affair with a young woman named Katie, who is now visibly pregnant with his child but is also somehow oblivious to it. Desperate to maintain his image, Harris had hired Art to prevent Katie from realizing that she is pregnant and to keep her willfully sequestered during his campaign. Art induced the relationship between Glen and Cyndi, and the illusion of pregnancy, so that the child could eventually be passed off to them without anyone knowing. However, when Harris viciously beats Art due to his mistaken belief that Art had sex with Katie, Art undoes Katie's hypnosis. At one of Harris' political rallies, Art can be seen as a supporter preparing to use his hypnotic technology in some way. (thanks to Wikipedia)
