Nia (Kristen Stewart) and Silas (Nicholas Hoult) work together. They live in a “world” known as The Collective. It is a man-made “world” where there is no crime and violence because human emotions have been eliminated. Being emotional makes one unequal to others and necessitates getting treatment to help suppress the emotions. Being emotional is a “disease”. Increasingly more people are being diagnosed with the “sickness”. As far as The Collective leaders are concerned, it is an epidemic. Some people that have been diagnosed with the illness are committing suicide because they are overwhelmed by the new thing they are experiencing called “emotion”, which is overwhelming and confusing them.
Scientists are working day and night, trying to come up with a cure that will hopefully keep people’s emotions at bay forever. Silas has been diagnosed with stage one of the illness. At the health facility, he meets someone who is at stage four and introduces him to a support group of sorts of other people with the same “illnesses”. These meet and talk about how they feel and how to cope. By then he had already established that Nia is also “sick” but is a hider, the kind who do not reveal that they have the “condition”. The two fall in love, they are so passionate about each other and it only gets worse when they make out, the emotions are too strong for them to keep at bay forever, they could explode. With the cure almost ready, they cannot imagine not feeling what they are feeling ever again. So they make plans to escape and go to a place where they can hopefully be allowed to feel and show it. No one knows what became of people who escaped in the past. They are willing to find out. This movie is berserk but interesting all the same.