Jacob Horner, played by Stacy Keach, has just earned his master's degree from Johns Hopkins University and steps from the graduation into a pulsing montage of 1960s upheaval. Images surge by—Kennedy’s assassination, civil rights protests, campus unrest, and the escalating Vietnam War—until he reaches a train platform and collapses into a catatonic stupor. The moment is fragile and shocking, a hinge between personal doubt and a wider social chaos.
James Earl Jones steps in as Doctor D, an unorthodox psychiatrist who sees through the silence to wake Jacob from his trance. He transports him to the Institute of Psychic Remobilization, often called The Farm, a bizarre asylum where therapy means enacting fantasies rather than simply talking about them. Inside, the atmosphere is clinical yet uncanny: a cross-dressing Nurse Dockey Ray Brock and other peculiar patients embody the extremes of desire and fear. There, Jacob is subjected to a regimen that blends harsh physical discipline with audiovisual experiments, a stark contrast to the calm, orderly world he once imagined. Before discharge, Doctor D makes a blunt prescription: find a place in society, but avoid personal or political engagement. With Jacob’s background in English literature, the recommended path is teaching prescriptive grammar at the local college.
Back on the outside, Jacob finds lodging in an abandoned factory and experiences a brief, unsettling fling with Peggy Rankin, a lonely, aging woman. Peggy Rankin, played by Grayson Hall, becomes a complicating thread in his new life. On his first day at the college, Jacob befriends Joe Morgan [Harris Yulin], a charismatic Boy Scout leader whose charm masks a darker, more controlling temperament. Joe invites Jacob and his wife Rennie Morgan [Dorothy Tristan] to dinner, and the dinner scene quickly reveals Joe’s manipulation: he seems to push Jacob toward an affair with Rennie and then cajoles Rennie into a horseback ride.
Rennie and Jacob’s clandestine affair soon changes the dynamic at home. Rennie becomes pregnant, and she tells Jacob about the pregnancy with Joe’s knowledge and René’s own fear—she does not want to leave Joe, and she threatens suicide if forced to terminate or abandon the marriage. Joe becomes furious and insists that Rennie obtain an abortion, pressing Jacob to arrange one. Faced with no easy options, Jacob tries to contact an abortionist he knows, but time runs out. Desperate, he takes Rennie to The Farm, where Doctor D oversees an unsafe abortion. The procedure is chaotic and dangerous: a curette is used, Rennie convulses under anesthesia, and she chokes to death as her mask slips.
The aftermath is stark. Jacob, deeply shaken, wraps Rennie’s body and with Doctor D disposes of it in a lake, a grim act that seals the unraveling of the life he is supposed to rebuild. The closing credits run as the Apollo 11 moon landing broadcasts fill the screen, paired with President Nixon welcoming the astronauts home—an eerie, cold counterpoint to the personal tragedy that has just unfolded.
Throughout, the film threads a quiet, unsettling mood: a young man’s search for meaning clashing with a world that asks him to silence his own voice, a modern-era fever dream where ideas about art, morality, and control collide in a sequence of stark, often brutal, moments. The result is a long, immersive meditation on responsibility, power, and the limits of psychiatric “remedies” when confronted with the messy truths of human desire and consequence.
