故事发生在遥远的未来世界中,在彼时的社会里,一群被称为“Equals”的种族成为了其中的主要生产力。相较于普通人类,Equals更加的完美,他们有美丽的外貌,高尚的道德感,稳定的情绪,聪慧的头脑,但与此同时,过于的完美让Equals失去了人类的感情。被称为SOS的疾病是这个社会里存在的最大不稳定因素,患上了SOS的人会变得敏感悲伤,抑郁冲动,居民们一旦被发现患上SOS症,就会被政府流放,永远无法再回归社会。
西拉斯(尼古拉斯·霍尔特 Nicholas Hoult 饰)就是一名SOS症患者,某日,他邂逅了名为尼雅(克里斯汀·斯图尔特 Kristen Stewart 饰)的女孩,尼雅虽然看似冷漠无情,但实际上,她也患有SOS症,一切只不过是她的伪装而已。
Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman), a worn-out private detective, is hired to look for a 16-year-old girl who has run away from the luxury home of her mother, formerly a small-time actress in Los Angeles. The more the weary cynic tries to get under the surface of the seemingly simple case, the harder it is for him to find his bearings among the lies and deceptions that surround him. Eight years after the key New Hollywood film Bonnie and Clyde, Arthur Penn and Gene Hackman reunited to collaborate on what was to become one of the most undervalued films of the decade. Like Polanski in Chinatown or Altman in The Long Goodbye, in his revisionist film noir, Penn also allows the 1940s classic genre to pervade the complex reality of the 1970s. The feelings of bitterness and emptiness in the modern Chandleresque protagonist originate not only in the “public” sphere of the strange, increasingly convoluted case, but in his private life as well (boyhood trauma, a broken marriage). As Moseby remarks of a sporting event, “nobody’s winning … one side is just losing slower than the other.”