Conspiracy Theory

New York City taxi driver Jerry Fletcher is a passionate conspiracy theorist, happily sharing his ideas with anyone who will listen. His favorite audience is Justice Department lawyer Alice Sutton, who tolerates him because he once saved her from a mugging but is unaware he spies on her at home. She is haunted by the murder of her father, a judge, which her boss Mr. Wilson believes was ordered by an inmate her father denied an appeal. One day, Jerry notices some men he surmises to be CIA agents, who lure him into a trap. They bring him to a man who, claiming to know Jerry well, injects him with LSD and demands to know who he has been talking to "about us." Experiencing terrifying hallucinations and flashbacks, Jerry manages to escape after biting the interrogator's nose, but is injured when the wheelchair he is taped to falls down a flight of stairs and a metal rod pierces his abdomen. Accosting Alice in the Justice Department lobby, a frantic, bloodied Jerry grabs a security guard's gun and is arrested. Taken to the hospital, Jerry is handcuffed to a bed and drugged. Before losing consciousness, he begs Alice to switch his chart with the criminal in the next bed, claiming he will be dead by morning otherwise. When Alice returns the next day, the criminal has died from an alleged heart attack and the police, along with the FBI and the CIA, arrive to ID the body, believing it to be Jerry's. The CIA is led by a psychiatrist named Dr. Jonas, whose nose is bandaged. Jerry fakes a heart attack and, with a reluctant Alice's help, escapes again. Alice and FBI Agent Lowry examine Jerry's belongings before the CIA confiscates them. She returns to her car to find Jerry hiding in the back seat. While driving, Jerry explains someone is likely following her. Alice waves the suspicious car on to discover it is Lowry; she convinces him to leave her alone until she has more information to offer. At Jerry's apartment, he suspects that something in the conspiracy newsletter he produces has set off this sudden interest in him, but has no idea what it is. Alice, meanwhile, begins to grasp the depths of Jerry's paranoia and loneliness, including his compulsion to buy copies of Catcher in the Rye despite never reading it. Just as she's decided he is crazy, a SWAT team starts to break in. Jerry activates devices that incinerate the apartment and they leave through a hidden trapdoor. In the room below, Alice is startled by a mural of her riding a horse - something she gave up after her father's murder - and the triple smokestacks of the Ravenswood Generating Station. Jerry disguises himself as a firefighter and carries Alice past emergency services and an arriving Jonas. They go to her apartment, where Jerry inadvertently reveals he has been watching Alice and is kicked out. Down on the street, Jerry notices Lowry and his partner staking out the apartment and warns them off at gunpoint. After a compulsive purchase at a bookstore is flagged by the CIA, Jerry flees from agents into a theater and escapes by faking a bomb threat. Alice is told by Mr. Wilson that the Justice Department must cooperate with Dr. Jonas to locate Jerry. Suspicious, she calls each person on Jerry's mailing list and finds that all but one, Harry Finch, have recently died. Jerry disables the CIA's van and uses a ruse to get Alice out of the office. While escaping through a subway station, he tells her that he fell in love with her at first sight, fleeing on a subway train when she brushes off his feelings. Alice goes to see Harry Finch, who turns out to be Jonas. He explains that he helped develop the MKUltra program, unofficially continuing it after being shut down in 1973. His brainwashing techniques, which he used to turn people like Jerry into assassins, were stolen by an unknown party, who he needs Jerry to identify. He also claims that Jerry killed Alice's father. She agrees to help find Jerry, who sends her a message to meet him. Ditching the agents by causing a traffic jam on the Queensboro Bridge and switching cars, he drives her to her father's private horse stables in Connecticut. Along the way, Alice secretly calls her office so Jonas and Wilson can track her phone. At the stables, Jerry remembers that he was programmed to kill her father but the sight of Alice dissuaded him. Instead, he became friends with the judge, remembering the inmate who was denied the appeal was actually innocent, and promised to watch over Alice after her father was mortally wounded by another assassin. Jonas' men arrive, capturing Jerry and killing Wilson, but Alice manages to escape. Alice brings Lowry to the offices where she met Jonas, which they find cleared out. She forces Lowry at gunpoint to admit that he is not actually FBI, but from a "secret agency that watches the other agencies". They have been using the unwitting Jerry to flush out Jonas and find out who he has been building assassins for. Alice goes to Ravenswood and sees a mental hospital next door. She breaks in and finds Jerry just as groups led by Jonas and Lowry arrive, setting off a gun battle. Jerry attempts to drown Jonas, who pulls an ankle gun and shoots Jerry before being killed by Alice. She tells Jerry she loves him before he is taken away in an ambulance. Some time later, a grieving Alice visits Jerry's grave and leaves a pin that he had given her. She takes up horse riding again. Observing Alice from a car with Lowry, Jerry—whose death and burial had been faked by the secret agency—reaffirms his agreement not to contact her until the rest of Jonas's subjects are caught. As they drive away singing "Can't Take My Eyes Off You", Alice finds the pin attached to her saddle, and smiles. Among the numerous conspiracy theories mentioned by Jerry include Rockefeller Center, fluoridation, the United Nations, the JFK assassination, Watergate funder Armand Hammer, the "New World Order", Freemasons, the CIA, the Vatican, microchipping of pets, Moon landings, Pearl Harbor, and silent "Black Helicopters".

Plot from Conspiracy Theory (film)CC BY-SA 4.0