The film opens in year 1993, inside a remote research hospital where a woman named Dr. Weaver,
explains in a video journal that her research subject, Gabriel, has grown too strong and uncontrollable.
She then gets interrupted by a security guard,
who informs her that Gabriel got out of his cell again.
While the hospital electricity flicker all around, Dr Weaver happens upon another
doctor getting thrown against the wall by none other than Gabriel.
Up next, Gabriel maims the
security guard, but before he hurts anyone else, Dr. Weaver manages to sedate him.
She orders a couple of security guards to strap him to a chair. Though weakened by the sedative, Gabriel still
broadcasts his thoughts through the radio, and vows to kill everyone working for the hospital.
Realizing that they cannot help Gabriel, Dr Weaver says that it's time to (cut out the cancer).
We are now taken to 27 years later, to a pregnant woman named Madison, who lives with her abusive
husband, Derek. The husband tells Madison that she needs to stop getting pregnant,
and they are arguing over Madison’s multiple miscarriages over the years. In the heat of the
moment, Derek, being the total douche that he is, smashes her head against the wall, causing it to bleed.
This scares Madison, so she locks herself in the bedroom for the rest of the day.
At night, Madison's husband is sleeping on the sofa downstairs. Then, a noise in the kitchen
wakes him up, and he looks to see that the smoothie maker is running. He turns it off,
and when he walks back to the living room...
Unbeknownst to him, a shadow appears closely behind him and attacks him.
When Madison awakens from her dream, we can see that her pillow is wet with the blood from the
back of her head. Spooked by the nightmare about her husband, she heads downstairs to find him.
But to her surprise, she discovers Derek's dead body with his head seemingly snapped backwards.
It wasn’t a dream after all, as she sees the entity crouching by her husband.
She runs for her life while the entity goes after her, and manages to make it back to her room.
But the entity breaks through the door, knocking her unconscious.
Later, homicides detectives arrive to investigate
the crime, which is being called a home invasion even though there are no signs of forced entry.
The next time Madison wakes up, she’s at a hospital with her sister, Sydney, and receives
the terrible news that she had a miscarriage from the attack at her house.
Detective Shaw arrives to visit Madison at the hospital on the following day. He speaks with Sydney,
where she learns of Madison's previous three miscarriages, something Sydney wasn't aware of.
Later on, the detectives learns from Madison's neighbor that Madison's husband was abusive.
They begin to suspect Madison as the killer because of their history of domestic abuse.
Two weeks later, Madison is released from the hospital, and returns home after making a full
recovery. Something weird happens during the first night, when she finds a streetlight down
the street flickering before turning off. Near it, she sees a figure standing in the dark,
and so, she rushes to lock all doors and close all windows to her house.
However, she’s not fast enough, and there is something wrong with one door which
won't shut properly. She then runs into her bedroom, and tells herself that there is no
such thing as monsters. Regardless, her fear lingers, and she is sleepless the whole night.
In the morning, Madison installs deadbolts on every single door in the house, confusing her
sister Sydney who’s come to check up on her. The sisters share a heartfelt conversation,
during which Madison reveals that she and Sydney are not biologically related.
Madison was adopted when she was 8, and doesn’t remember anything about her life prior to that.
On the other side of the city, a middle-aged woman named Serena,
who works as a tour guide is finishing up for the day when she begins hearing noises coming
from a dark hall. Curious, she turns the lights on to see what’s going on. All of a sudden,
she gets ambushed by the entity, AKA Gabriel, who captures and holds her captive in his lair.
There, he takes out her phone, and uses it to call his actual target; Dr. Weaver.
We now get to see Dr. Weaver in present day, who receives a call from Gabriel.
This prompts her to browse through her old patient files, and she begins to recall something.
Later that evening, Madison is doing her laundry at home when the house lights start to flicker,
and her head injury begins bleeding again. And then while she is putting
the towel into the washing machine, Dr Weaver's face appears next to her.
Gabriel suddenly appears and begins tossing Dr. Weaver around. At this point, Madison is
seemingly paralyzed, and the environment around her suddenly changes, and forms into the inside
of Dr. Weaver's home.
She then sees a vision of Dr. Weaver getting beaten to death by Gabriel.
Madison screams in horror and snaps back to reality,
when she sees the injury in the back of her head bleeding again.
Hours later, the police arrive at Dr. Weaver’s house to investigate the crime scene.
There, Detective Shaw find a picture of young female patient among the doctor’s old files from 1992,
and asks one of his co-workers to age the picture 30 years.
News about Dr. Weaver’s death gets covered on TV, shocking Madison. Overwhelmed, she vomits in
the toilet while telling her sister that she just witnessed a vision of Dr. Weaver getting murdered.
But the terror is not over; that night, when Madison is sleeping,
she dreams about Gabriel brutally murdering another man,
who is staying in a building called Silvercup.
This man was Dr. Weaver’s
colleague we briefly saw in the beginning of the movie. After he finished killing the man,
Gabriel and Madison exchanged looks, and she sees his disfigured face for the first time.
She wakes up screaming, causing her sister Sydney to come running to comfort her.
They head to the police station, and face detectives Shaw and Moss, to tell them that
Madison’s been having visions of the recent murders happening in the city, and in fact,
she could guide them to the location of the latest murder. As the story sounds absurd, the detectives
are skeptical, but are willing to check the place out. As expected, they discover a dead body there.
And so, the detectives ask her to describe what the murderer looked like,
but yet again the detectives found the description she gave ridiculous.
Madison excuses herself to the bathroom, when Gabriel suddenly calls her. During the call,
he reminds her that her real name is Emily, and they knew each other before she was adopted.
After this conversation, Madison faintly starts to remember, and starts calling him Gabriel.
Freaked out by this revelation, she hangs up and leaves the police station.
Right after she leaves, Detective Shaw discovers that Madison was the young
girl in the photo and was a patient of Dr Weaver, and that her real name is Emily May.
Back to Madison, she catches her sister up on her recent discovery, and the two head to
their mother’s house to dig out more information about Madison’s adoption. After she mentions the
name Gabriel, the mom goes to show them an old video of little Madison speaking
to thin air during her birthday celebration. As it turns out, Madison had an ‘imaginary’ friend
named Gabriel when she was a child. Later, Gabriel called Madison through a toy phone,
saying that he was going to hurt the baby in her mother's belly, referring to the unborn Sydney.
While this is going on, Detective Shaw goes through Dr. Weaver’s case file,
and notices a pattern. The suspect seems to be targeting Dr. Weaver’s old colleagues,
and so far, there is one person left alive named Dr. Gregory. Worried, Shaw rushes to his place.
Back at the mother’s house, Madison gets another vision;
Gabriel arrives at Dr. Gregory’s place and murders him in cold blood.
Not long after, Detective Shaw arrives, and witnesses the gruesome aftermath.
Madison tries to warn Shaw that Gabriel is still in the room but she appears invisible to him.
He attacks Shaw and the two get into a scuffle. Shaw tries shooting him but misses,
and Gabriel still manages to escape the building with his superhuman agility. He jumps down the
building in a weird way, while the officer chases after him. Risking it all, Shaw goes after him
down to the city’s underground, but Gabriel manages to escape again through the ceiling.
After this experience, Detective Shaw goes to see Madison to ask her what she remembers
about her past, but Madison doesn’t remember anything that happened before she was eight.
Therefore, they go to a hypnotherapist to unlock her so-called repressed memories.
The hypnosis gets her to remember her childhood; and we see a flashback in which young Madison
receives a call on her toy phone from Gabriel. Young Madison draws a knife from the kitchen,
and it looks like she's about to have herself some cake in the kitchen. But her surroundings
then form into her parents' bedroom, and Madison finds herself holding a knife over her adoptive
mother's pregnant belly, showing that Gabriel really wanted to get rid of the new baby.
Madison is frightened by the memory, so the psychiatric hypnotherapist wakes her up and calms her down.
Meanwhile, at Gabriel’s lair, Serena the tour guide finally breaks free of her binds and
attempts to escape, but the floor collapses and she falls downstairs, right in front of Madison
and everyone in the room, meaning that Gabriel’s lair had been in Madison’s attic this entire time.
With all the evidence stacked against her, Madison gets arrested by the police.
In the interrogation room, Madison keeps explaining that she is not the killer;
but she can't tell them why Serena was in her house. Seeing the police not believe her,
Madison gets mad and screams, causing the lights in the room all explode at the same
time; and Detective Shaw receives a call from Gabriel. Gabriel says that he is responsible;
and Madison has nothing to do with it.
Unwilling to settle with the fact that her sister was arrested, Sydney does a little
investigating on her own. She collects Madison’s old adoption papers, and visits the hospital
Madison was adopted from. Today, the hospital is abandoned, but that doesn’t deter Sydney.
She immediately heads for the archive room, until she finds Madison’s files and a tape.
Together with her mom, she plays the tape at home, which contains a recording of a
young woman named Serena May, who Gabriel held hostage. She got pregnant after she was raped,
and named her baby Emily May, before handing the baby to the research hospital for Dr. Weaver to
experiment on. Well, here they learn that Serena is Madison a.k.a. Emily May’s biological mother.
Right now, Serena is hospitalized after the fall from the ceiling, and after studying
Dr. Weaver’s files further, Detective Shaw also discovers that Serena is Madison’s birth mother.
Back to Sydney, the videotape goes on; we now see Emily AKA Madison as a child.
She just killed another child in the hospital, and is telling Dr. Weaver that it’s not her
fault because Gabriel is in her mind, and would whisper her to do bad things. However, when the
camera pans to Madison’s back, it is revealed that Gabriel wasn’t an imaginary friend after all, he’s
Madison’s parasitic twin who’s attached to her head and back. Afterwards in the video, Dr. Weaver
explains that after further studies, they learn that Gabriel is able to make Madison see things,
and would manipulate her to do things for him. As the doctors are unable to contain Gabriel,
they decide to surgically remove him. However, as Madison and Gabriel mostly share the same brain,
they’re unable to completely cut his brain out of Madison.
Meanwhile at the police station, Madison is placed in a temporary detention cell with other felons,
who all gang up against her, and start to beat her to the ground for no reason. As she
tries to bear through the pain, something else literally emerges from the back of her head,
who is none other than Gabriel, revealing to us that Gabriel has been taking over Madison’s
body to go on a killing spree this entire time. By taking control of Madison's body,
Gabriel went on a killing spree of all the doctors responsible for trying to
get rid of him. Madison was able to see all the murders from her subconscious,
but was unaware of what was truly going on as she did not have full control of her mind or body.
Inside the cell, the rest of the women scream in fear, as Gabriel maims them with his bare hands.
An officer tries to shoot at Gabriel multiple times,
but Gabriel manages to grab the keys from him and run away.
After watching the tapes, Sydney has figured it all out; she calls Detective Shaw and catches
him up on everything. She theorizes that Gabriel remained dormant all these years,
but when Madison’s husband smashed her head against the wall, Gabriel woke up and has
continued taking over her body ever since. Meanwhile, Gabriel heads to the evidence room
to retrieve his favorite weapon, and proceeds to murder the officers at the police station.
He cruelly kills all the police who are stopping him from escaping. Because they’re the main
characters, Shaw and Moss are the two officers left standing, and they face off against Gabriel,
who eventually slashes Moss across the gut. Shaw tries calling Madison’s name to get her to wake
up, but Madison is still stuck in her own mind, and only seems confused as to what’s going on.
Afterwards, Gabriel leaves the scene, and knowing that Gabriel’s next target would be Madison’s
birth mother, both Detective Shaw and Sydney rush to the hospital where she’s being treated.
Sydney arrives at the mother's ward first, and encounters Gabriel. Detective
Shaw arrives next and is about to finish him, but Sydney stops him because she cares about Madison.
Up next, he throws
a hospital bed at Sydney, trapping her under it. Meanwhile Madison watches from her mental prison,
unable to move. Sydney tries to get through to Madison and tells her that Gabriel was feeding
off of Madison's fetuses to build himself back up. Seeing her sister in trouble though,
Madison begins to fight back, but it’s too late; Gabriel shoots her sister in the head.
When Gabriel is going to his mother, Madison wakes up, and takes back control of her body.
Gabriel suddenly feels himself being transported someplace else, meaning that Madison has finally
learned to take charge of her own mind, and proceeds to trap Gabriel inside a mental
prison in the back of her mind. Not only that, as it turns out Madison only conjured up the
image of Gabriel killing Sydney to trick him, and Sydney is actually still alive in the real world.
With Gabriel locked away, Madison regains control of her body, and now has the same
superhuman strength as Gabriel; she lifts the hospital bed to free her sister. The two embrace,
and Madison remarks that even though they are not related by blood, Madison will always love Sydney
as a sister. Madison’s biological mother watches in relief, and this is where the movie ends.