In the Los Angeles theater The Rex, moviegoers sit through a film that plays inside a film, titled The Mommy. At the heart of the story is John Pressman, an extremely myopic, uncontrolled diabetic who works as an ophthalmologist’s assistant and is steadily going blind. His domineering mother, Alice Pressman, uses hypnosis to steer him toward murder so she can collect the eyes of others and bring them back to her. One night, against her wishes, John barricades himself inside a screening of a movie called The Lost World and begins a brutal rampage with a scalpel, targeting the theater’s patrons as the lights go down.
The siege unfolds as the theater is sealed off and panic spreads among the crowd. The survivors scramble to escape while the police rush to contain the violence. In a critical turn, the officers bring Alice into the theater, hoping to calm John; however, in the tense confrontation, Alice is accidentally shot by the police. The violence ends with John in custody, and a detective lingering over Alice’s lifeless body as the screen fades to black on that chapter of the story.
As The Mommy continues to play out for the anxious audience inside The Rex, the real-life patrons begin to experience the film’s disturbing echoes. Anxiety erupts into disorientation for many, with one man growing increasingly agitated while constantly checking his watch, and a teenage girl named Patty suffering visible distress she cannot fully voice. The tension erupts when a concession worker is slain by this unnamed intruder, who drags the bodies into the bathroom—a moment that mirrors a brutal bathroom murder that unfolds within The Mommy itself. Linda, a friend of Patty, narrowly escapes and then urges help, signaling the depth of the danger that bleeds off the screen into the theater’s own rooms.
Within the film’s frame, the intruder barricades the projectionist in the booth and then returns to the main hall, forcing Patty at gunpoint and reciting lines from The Mommy. As John Pressman begins his on-screen rampage, the intruder mirrors the carnage in real life, shooting into the audience while using Patty as a shield. Outside, a SWAT team converges, coordinating with the police to breach the projection booth from above. The intruder’s plea to be saved by Alice escalates the tension, but when the police shoot and kill Alice, his resolve hardens and he resumes firing until a sniper ends his life.
Patty’s ordeal leaves a lasting impression: a vision of John gouging out her eye haunts her as she looks toward the screen. The aftermath finds Patty reunited with Linda and taken to a hospital for evaluation, where doctors assure her there is no physical harm, though the psychological scars run deep. In a final, unsettling twist, an unseen orderly—revealed to be John—attacks Linda in an elevator, his intent clear as he claims he is not merely a figment of Patty’s imagination. Patty screams as John approaches, his gaze fixed on her eyes. The camera then pulls back to show a theater full of people watching the events unfold on-screen, revealing that Patty’s story is, in fact, a film within a film within a film. The credits roll for Anguish as the theater’s patrons begin to leave, ending the multilevel, haunting experience with a chilling sense of looping fiction.
