In a polluted future Britain, around 2091, the air is thick with pollution and most people must wear filtration masks when they go outside. AirZone, a powerful corporation, signs a lucrative deal with the government to tackle the crisis. The public is told that AirZone will build gigantic filtration plants to clean the atmosphere, but environmentalists grow increasingly skeptical as reports surface of people dying and disappearing near AirZone facilities.
Investigative filmmaker Al Dunbar has been collaborating with Anthony Stanwick, the leader of a radical environmental group, on a Michael Moore–style exposé about AirZone. Yet when his mentor, the enigmatic Oliver Threthewey, insists that the documentary lacks hard proof of AirZone’s true intentions, Dunbar and Stanwick hatch a plan to infiltrate AirZone’s headquarters and hack into the mainframe. Stanwick’s covert work is aided by Rachel Lonsdale, an AirZone employee serving as his inside mole within the organization.
Meanwhile, Arnie Davies, a popular local television meteorologist, is primed to go on air even as he flirts with the make-up artist and his girlfriend, Ellie Brown, a journalist. Dunbar manages to infiltrate AirZone’s offices, but triggering an alarm while hacking into the computer sends guards after him. He reaches a lab where Rachel is being injected with a green fluid and helps her escape, but is killed in the process.
As Dunbar dies, both Arnie and Stanwick share a vision of his demise. For Arnie, the vision interrupts a live broadcast, and he faints on air. After a quiet night with Ellie, Arnie is troubled to see a spectral figure of Dunbar in his hallway. Dunbar’s apparition becomes a recurring, unnerving presence that nudges Arnie toward uncovering the truth about AirZone.
Arnie, guided in part by the ghostly reach of Dunbar, continues to experience strange visions at work and at home, while Ellie suggests they investigate Dunbar’s own house. There they discover Dunbar’s unfinished documentary and a hiding place where he kept a spare key, but their search is interrupted when a detective arrives with a warrant to seize AirZone property.
Arnie eventually meets Stanwick again and discovers that he is not alone in believing the sightings are real; the three of them – Arnie, Stanwick, and Rachel Lonsdale – pursue the mystery further. They locate Rachel, who is suffering severe distress from whatever drug or chemical AirZone has been pumping into her body. Before they can get her medical help, masked men abduct her. This ordeal intensifies Arnie’s fixation on uncovering AirZone’s truth, and during his next weather broadcast he openly questions AirZone’s integrity and its supposed pollution solutions.
Ellie has the weighty assignment of interviewing the Environment Secretary [Michael Wisher] and then covering AirZone’s public unveiling of its pollution-reduction plan presented by the company’s head, Robin Archer. Arnie’s interruption casts tension on AirZone’s presentation, and it’s not long before Stanwick reappears with Rachel, who has been recovered, and a troubling revelation about the public being tested and transformed by genetic experiments. Those experiments have produced people with gill-like neck appendages, and the public learns that AirZone’s so-called solution is not to reduce pollution but to intensify it to engineer a new breath of life for a polluted world.
With the plan exposed, AirZone’s facade crumbles. MacNamara, a mysterious figure working for Robin Archer, is revealed to have been operating inside AirZone on behalf of MI5, signaling an inside collapse of the scheme. He notes that AirZone was a good idea, but a bad image, and steps away. Then the enigmatic Oliver Threthewey makes a final appearance, suggesting that Al Dunbar’s legacy would be proud of the persistence shown by Arnie, Ellie, and Stanwick, though the origin of the Dunbar apparition remains unexplained.
