Knowing (2009) Full Recap

In 1959, a pale little girl stands alone in a schoolyard, staring up at the sky. Her name is Lucinda Embry. Her teacher, Miss Taylor, has to call her name again and again before she finally comes inside. Tomorrow is the opening day of their brand new school, and there was a contest to find the best way to celebrate it.

The winning idea came from Lucinda. Miss Taylor holds up a metal time capsule. This is a time capsule. Every child will draw a picture of what they think the future will look like. The pictures will go in the capsule and 50 years from now, a new class will open it. The other kids draw rockets and spaceships.

Lucinda doesn't draw anything. She fills her page with numbers, line after line, as fast as her hand can move. When time is up, she's still writing. Miss Taylor reminds her the assignment was a picture and takes the paper away before she can finish. At the ceremony, the whole town gathers in front of the school.

The people of the future are asked to open the capsule in 50 years and it's lowered into the ground. Lucinda's envelope goes down with all the others. Then Lucinda disappears. The teachers and a police officer search the dark school with flashlights. Miss Taylor finally finds her hiding in a closet under the gym.

She's been scratching at the door with her bare hands. All she says is, "Please make them stop whispering." 50 years later, in a big old house outside Boston, a father sets up a telescope in the yard for his son. His name is John Kusler, and the boy is Caleb. Caleb asks if anyone has found life on other planets.

Not yet, John says. Then he explains how many worlds out there might have it. Millions of them. Caleb only asked to see if he was listening. Then Caleb announces he's become a vegetarian, which is news to the man who buys the groceries and makes the famous Sunday night hot dogs. At bedtime, Jon sits on the edge of the bed.

When he said it was just us out there, he meant space. He didn't mean heaven. Caleb says he doesn't even believe in heaven. Jon says nobody can know for sure. And if Caleb wants to believe, that's fine. Caleb's mom died last year. Before he turns out the light, Jon says what they always say, "You and me together forever." When Caleb is asleep, Jon sits alone in the dark with a drink.

Jon teaches astrophysics at MIT. Today's topic is randomness versus determinism. Is everything in the universe part of a plan with a reason behind every event? Or is it all just a long chain of chemical accidents with no meaning at all? He talks about the sun sitting at exactly the right distance for life on Earth.

A student asks him what he believes. He says things just happen and ends the class. His friend Phil Beckman from the cosmology department catches up with him on campus. His wife's sister is coming to town and she wants Jon to join them for dinner. Jon isn't ready for that. Then he checks the time.

He's late for Caleb's ceremony. At the school, the children sing and the capsule is dug up after 50 years. An old woman is invited to open it. It's Miss Taylor, the same teacher who was there in 1959. Jon makes it just in time to hear Caleb sing. Every child gets an old envelope.

The other kids pull out drawings of rockets. Caleb's envelope holds a page full of numbers. Everyone else got a picture. At home, Caleb asks if he can go to a sleepover at his friend Jason's house this weekend. Jon says he'll think about it, which Caleb knows means no. Then Jon finds the page of numbers.

Caleb thinks it might mean something like a math puzzle. Jon tells him it belongs to the school and he has to give it back tomorrow. Late that night, Jon sets his glass down on the page and leaves a ring. Then he notices the numbers inside the ring. 91 1101. And next to them, 2,996.

September 11th, 2001. 2,996 people died that day. John stays up all night at his computer. He matches line after line to the dates of major disasters around the world. plane crashes, earthquakes, fires. Each date is followed by the exact number of people who died, and three of the dates haven't happened yet.

In the morning, Caleb has to wake him up. In the car, he asks if his dad is sick. Jon says he just had a lot of work last night. He takes the page to Phil. Every major disaster of the last 50 years is on it in perfect order. The next date is tomorrow and it says 81 people will die.

Phil thinks he's lost it. Then John shows him one more date. The day his wife Allison died in a hotel fire. It's on the list too on a piece of paper that was buried in the ground for five decades. Phil says people see what they want to see in numbers. He thinks losing Allison has clouded Jon's judgment.

Jon visits Miss Taylor, now a frail old woman. She remembers Lucinda as a sad little girl. On the day of the capsule, they found her in that closet scratching at the door with her fingernails. Something had frightened her, but she never told anyone what it was. Jon asks if he can meet her.

Miss Taylor tells him Lucinda passed away years ago. Back home, an old car is parked under the trees by the yard. A pale man inside hands Caleb a small black stone through the window. Jon runs out and the car drives away. Caleb says they were just some guys. Jon reminds him what he said about strangers.

Then Jon looks Lucinda up online. She was found dead in 1988. His sister Grace drops by on her way to the night shift. She offers to take Caleb for an evening so Jon can go out like a normal person. Jon says he and Caleb are fine. Then she brings up their father, a pastor. He asks about Jon every time she sees him.

Jon hasn't spoken to him since Allison died. You're going to have to speak to him one day. Grace says it's what Allison wanted for Caleb to have a grandfather. The next night, Jon waits by the TV. There's an explosion on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, but everyone gets out alive.

Maybe he was wrong. The next day, he's late to pick up Caleb, and he gets stuck in traffic on the highway in the rain. He calls Phil to apologize and says he'll come to dinner after all. Then he looks at the page again. The numbers beside each date that he couldn't explain are coordinates and they match the spot where he's sitting right now.

Jon gets out and walks up to the police at the front of the jam. They say it's just a car accident. Nothing serious. Then a passenger jet comes down out of the sky and slams into the field beside the highway. Jon runs into the wreckage to help. There's fire everywhere and almost nothing he can do.

Rescue workers finally pull him back. That night, the news says the presumed dead number 81. Grace has come to take care of Caleb. Jon only wants to sleep. Caleb is angry. His dad won't let him go to Jason's. won't explain anything and keeps acting weird. He's not a little kid anymore.

John shows Phil the date, the death count, and the coordinates. All right, there. He drove past at the exact moment the prediction came true. That's not a coincidence. There are two disasters left, and Jon believes the numbers are a warning meant for him. Phil says they might just as easily be a warning to stay away.

He could have been killed today and Caleb would have been an orphan. That night, Caleb wakes up. A pale man is standing in his room. He shows Caleb a window and through it the whole forest is burning with animals running from the flames. Caleb screams and Jon runs in and holds him.

"It's just a bad dream," he says. Jon goes outside with a baseball bat. He sees a figure in the dark woods and yells at it to stay away from his family. Then he tracks down Lucinda's daughter and finds her house. He follows the mother and her little girl to a natural history museum.

Caleb and the girl hit it off right away. And they look like they're they're already best friends. She knows all about the animals. Her name is Abby. Her mother's name is Diana Wayland. Caleb shows Abby some sign language. He wears a hearing aid and sounds get jumbled for him sometimes.

Jon and Diana sit down together with the kids. She's a single parent, too. She threw out her cheating husband years ago. Then Jon tells her they didn't meet by accident. He asks if her mother had some kind of gift. Then he shows her the list. He followed one of Lucinda's predictions and watched 81 people die.

Exactly when and where she said they would. The page says 178 more will die tomorrow in New York and 33 more on October 19th. Diana grabs Abby and tells him to stay away from them. Jon begs her to help. He thinks Caleb is in danger. At home, Jon works out the next coordinates. A street corner in lower Manhattan.

The news is already warning about a possible attack on a city on the east coast. He calls the FBI from a pay phone and tells them to close off the corner of Lafayette and Worth. This is not a crank call. He says he leaves Caleb with Grace and asks her one thing. Don't let him watch the news.

In New York, the corner is packed with people and nobody has closed anything off. Jon asks a police officer why. Why hasn't this intersection been sealed off? The officer tells him to calm down and come with him. Jon runs and the police follow him down into the subway. The platform is crowded.

Jon spots a nervous man and thinks he's the attacker. The transit police chase the man onto a train with their guns out. He's only a pickpocket, begging them to let him go. Then a train comes off the rails in the tunnel. It's headed straight into the station. It smashes along the platform and Jon throws himself out of the way.

He climbs out into the dust and smoke. It was never an attack. It was an accident just like the page said that night. Diana is waiting outside J's house. She's seen the news. She asks him about October 19th. Her mother used to talk about that day all the time. She said it was the day Diana was going to die.

She's lived her whole life with that hanging over her. Diana takes him to see her mother's old place. On the drive, Jon tells her about his wife. Last year, Allison was on a business trip to Phoenix a few days before his birthday. A fire started in her hotel at 4 in the morning, and she died in her sleep.

She She wouldn't have known anything about it. While she was dying, he was at home blowing leaves off the lawn. He didn't feel a thing. After that, he decided life was just a string of random accidents. Then the list came along. If he'd had it before, he could have saved her. Lucinda's old trailer still sits in the woods.

Diana was nine when her mother died out here, and she never came back for any of her things. Then she looks at the last number on the list. She thinks it isn't a number at all. Abby sometimes writes things backwards. Read backwards. The 33 looks like two capital E. Inside, the walls are covered with news clippings of disasters.

Diana says her mother heard voices whispering terrible things to her. One day, her father took Diana away and said Lucinda was sick. On the wall hangs an old drawing of a blazing sun with angels and wheels of fire. Lucinda used to stare at it for hours. John finds a Bible and on the floor a small black stone just like the one the stranger gave Caleb.

Then he shines his light into the bedroom. The wall is scratched with the same two words over and over everyone else. Meanwhile, the kids are waiting in the car and the pale strangers are standing all around it. The kids say the whisper people talked to them. They said they could go with them if they chose to.

Jon chases one of the strangers into the woods, but it vanishes in a flash of light. Later, Diana admits people have been following her and Abby, too. Then, Jon explains why there are no coordinates after the final date. It isn't one place. It's everywhere. Diana says her mother was disturbed.

She could have made it all up. She's been right so far, Jon says, about everything. Diana lies down with Abby, who's all she's got. Down the hall, Caleb tells his dad he hears the whispers, too, just like Abby. Jon promises him he'll never let anything happen to him. In the morning, Abby is drawing a picture.

It's the sun. Jon races to the observatory and finds Phil. He remembers Phil's own research about super flares coming off a distant star. A wave of radiation so big it will strip away the ozone layer and kill every living thing on Earth. And the government already knows. Jon thought there was a purpose to all this.

Why get the warning if there's nothing he can do? He tells Phil to go home and be with his family. Diana says she spent her whole life knowing her mother was right and pretending she was crazy. She knows some caves where she used to play as a child. If they hide underground, maybe they have a chance.

While the others pack, Jon finds a wrapped present that Allison bought for his birthday. Inside is a silver locket with a photo of the three of them. Then he calls his father for the first time in a year. Allison always wanted him to make that call. He reminds his father of a sermon about the gift of prophecy.

Now he has one. He tells him to get his mom and grace underground tonight. His father says if it's his time, it's his time. He's ready whenever the Lord calls him. Then he asks his son, "Are you?" John can only say one word. "Dad." Jon finds Caleb at his desk, scratching numbers into the wood with no idea he's doing it.

Jon loads everyone into his truck, but he doesn't drive to the caves. He drives back to the school. Lucinda ran out of time before she could finish her list, so she scratched the last numbers into the closet door. Jon breaks into the closet. They're still there, the location of the last event.

Diana thinks he's lost his mind. She takes the kids and her own car, and she drives off to the caves without him. On the road, Abby says the whisper people know where they are. They whisper right into their heads. At a gas station, the TV says the flares may be worse than anyone thought, and people should find shelter underground.

The president is already being moved to a secure location. Caleb calls his dad from a pay phone. Jon tells Diana the numbers point to her mother's trailer. That's where they have to go. Diana thinks he's insane. She hangs up. Then one of the strangers drives off in Diana's car with both kids inside.

Diana jumps into another car and races after them. At an intersection, a truck slams into her. Jon reaches the gas station and the clerk tells him a man took the lady's car with the kids inside. Down the road, he finds police and an ambulance. Diana is badly hurt. She dies on the way.

Knowing (2009) Ending Explained

Jon follows the coordinates to Lucinda's trailer. Diana's car is parked there, empty. He finds Caleb and Abby in a clearing, each holding a white rabbit. The strangers are standing behind them. Caleb says they won't hurt anyone. They've been protecting the kids all along. They sent the numbers ahead to prepare the way, and now they've come for them.

A huge glowing ship rises out of the trees. Abby says the whisper people told her that her mommy is safe now. Caleb says it's time to go. They've been chosen, so everything can start over. Jon wants to go with them, but the stranger shakes his head. Only the children can go, the ones who heard the call.

Jon kneels and tells Caleb he has to take care of Abby now. Caleb doesn't want to go without him. He says we'd be together forever. John tells him all of us. And mom, too. He knows that now. He hangs the locket around Caleb's neck. The strangers turn into beings of pure light, and they lead the children into the ship.

It shoots up into the sky, and all over the world, other lights rise with it. Jon watches them go. In the morning, he drives into a city that's falling apart. He makes it to his parents' house. His mother, Grace, and his father are all there. He holds his father tight. "This isn't the end," his father says.

Jon says he knows. Then the flare hits and fire sweeps across the whole planet. Somewhere far away on a new world, Caleb and Abby step out into a golden field and they run together toward a great white tree. A father who believed nothing happened for a reason learned that some things are written down long before they happen.

He couldn't save the world, but he got his son to safety and he found his way back to his own father.