Rocky Foscoe is a Chicago barber whose routine life is disrupted after a late-night drive along Old Orchard Road. While parked, he experiences a nightmare in which his car appears to hover in mid-air, a vision that unsettles him and prompts a visit to a doctor for an explanation.
When he tries to return to work, anxiety grips him and he has a full-blown attack, forcing him to flee the shop and leaving his mistress worried about his behavior. Driven to make sense of what happened, he heads back to the road, where an enigmatic old man offers help and mentions that strange things have been happening on that stretch—even hearing screams from the sky, hinting that Rocky’s car may have truly floated.
Rocky endures another sudden episode, and in the chaos the old man fires a shotgun at him. Rocky responds with a sudden, overwhelming force, killing his would-be helper with what seems to be a psychic power. Five hours later, Chicago police discover the old man’s body and a trail of tire tracks from Rocky’s car that abruptly stop, as if the car had floated away into the night.
That same night, a newspaper item about the old man’s death catches the doctor’s attention, leading him to connect Rocky to the killing and to alert the authorities. Later, Rocky himself reappears and, in a confrontation with the doctor, kills him with his psychic powers. When the police arrive, they wrestle with whether the events point to something supernatural or dangerously real.
The next day, the police consult a psychologist at the Chicago Institute of Psychology, Professor, who advances a parapsychological theory. He suggests that Rocky has tapped into a latent power of his subconscious mind, a force he terms psychotronic energy that could fuel his extraordinary and dangerous abilities.
Back at home, the tension intensifies as Rocky visits his mistress and returns to a tense standoff with his wife. Mrs. Foscoe becomes a focal point of the mounting danger as their confrontation spirals toward violence, with Rocky’s powers hovering on the edge of eruption.
Outside, the investigation grows more urgent. Officer Maloney and other officers stake out the residence, trying to anticipate Rocky’s moves, while the pursuit expands into downtown Chicago. Rocky keeps ahead, at times seemingly lifting the car itself, until a dead end forces a crash and a desperate scramble on foot.
In a warehouse confrontation, Rocky seizes a gun from an officer he has trapped, then climbs toward the roof of a nearby hotel, leaving a security guard dead in his wake. The chase continues into a boiler room, where he uses his psychic powers again to kill one of the pursuing officers and escapes to a tower in an adjacent building. A SWAT team is brought in, only to find itself facing a foe who might not be easily stopped.
A new figure arrives: S.I.A. Agent Gorman. He orders the police to capture Rocky alive so his extraordinary abilities can be studied for national security. The sheriff plays along, bluffing that Rocky has one last chance to surrender, but the moment of surrender never comes. Instead, Rocky is shot after a tense standoff, falls from the tower, and disappears from sight. The streets below reveal no body, leaving the trail unresolved.
In the final shot, the camera returns to the woods along Old Orchard Road, where Rocky’s presence lingers and the cycle feels poised to begin again, leaving viewers with a haunting sense that his power—and the mystery—may never be fully laid to rest.
