Alfred is a talented artist. He does not care to be rich or famous and gives full attention to his artworks and creation. His girlfriend Moniek is a successful writer for a popular soap opera. Alfred's lack of ambition and negligence towards money and material life irritates Moniek, who bases the plot for each soap opera episode on her own life. Alfred discovers Moniek has been conducting an affair with her boss after watching the soap opera, and moves in with his sister after the couple splits. To support himself, he begins offering his services as a friend to strangers at 50 guilders per hour.

In San Francisco, college dropout John Elias (John Light) is determined to set up his own internet business named Digital Dreams, based on his vision of building a better and faster communication for mankind. He hires a deal closer named Robert Jennings (Jeffrey Donovan) as his Executive VP and after successfully receiving the finance, John and Robert start to launch and run the company together. But once he makes his first million, John is soon distracted by greed, fame and fortune whilst his company starts to become at risk of a hostile takeover.

Michael Faraday is a history professor at George Washington University, teaching a class on American terrorism and living in Reston, Virginia, with his young son Grant. Since the death of his wife Leah, an FBI agent, Michael remains friends with her partner Whit Carver and is dating his former graduate student Brooke Wolfe. Finding a boy named Brady injured by fireworks, Michael rushes him to the hospital and meets his parents, Oliver and Cheryl Lang. They discover they are neighbours on Arlington Road and their sons become friends, joining a scouting troop together. Oliver appears to lie about an alumni letter delivered by mistake and about a blueprint Michael notices in the Langs' house. Michael becomes suspicious, intensified by Oliver's anti-government sentiments and his interest in Leah's death, but reluctantly lets Grant join Brady on a scouting trip. He presents his class with the case of Dean Scobee, who died bombing a federal building in St. Louis months earlier despite no record of terrorist activity. Bringing his students to the site of the Ruby Ridge -style standoff where Leah was killed, an emotional Michael excoriates the FBI for mistakenly identifying their target as a potential terrorist. Michael determines Oliver lied about where he attended college and was actually born William Fenimore in the same Kansas town as the deceased Oliver Lang, and 16-year-old William was arrested for trying to blow up a government office. Michael convinces the Langs' children to let him into Oliver's home office while their parents are out, and he finds the suspicious blueprint hidden behind a Gateway Arch schematic, but is nearly caught when Cheryl returns. Brooke dismisses Michael's concerns, suggesting his terrorism studies and Leah's death have made him paranoid and obsessive. Oliver confronts Michael for investigating him, explaining that the attempted bombing was a regrettable act as an angry teenager: the government cut off his family's farm from their water supply, and his father committed suicide, staged as an accident so the family could collect his life insurance payout, but they lost their land. To escape his past, William assumed the name of Oliver Lang, a childhood friend who died after college. Brooke later spots Oliver switching vehicles and follows him to a warehouse where he loads his car with mysterious cases. She leaves Michael a voicemail but is confronted by Cheryl. That night, Michael learns Brooke has been killed in an apparent car accident, and is comforted by the Langs, apologising to them for his mistrust. However, a call from Whit reveals that Michael's answering machine has been erased, and he warns Whit to investigate his suspicions about Oliver. Visiting Dean Scobee's father, who is certain his son could not have acted alone, Michael notices a photo of Dean with Grant's scout leader. He realizes Grant has been taken by Oliver, who declares that he and his sinister group killed Brooke; he murdered the real Oliver to assume his identity, and threatens Grant's life, warning Michael not to interfere with their plans. Whit finds nothing incriminating about Oliver but confirms that Michael received a call from the payphone Brooke used. Driving there, Michael spots the Langs' associates and tries to follow them but sees Grant inside their van. Michael is intercepted and beaten by Oliver, who asserts his group's mission, but Michael overpowers him and realises he intends to blow up the J. Edgar Hoover Building. Warning Whit, Michael pursues the van into the building's garage, only to discover he is chasing a decoy. He finds the bomb planted in the trunk of his car as it detonates (having unknowingly driven the bomb to its destination in his own vehicle), and Oliver watches from a distance as the blast destroys FBI headquarters. With Michael and Whit among the dead, the Langs and their conspirators successfully frame Michael as a lone wolf terrorist — just as they did with Dean Scobee — seeking revenge on the FBI for Leah's death, supported by accounts of his increasingly erratic behaviour. It is implied that the Langs and their organization had chosen Faraday long before to be their patsy because of his history, and had been planning to involve and frame him all along. The orphaned Grant moves in with relatives, unaware of his father's innocence, while Oliver and Cheryl prepare to move their family to another safe suburb for their next attack.

Shigeharu Aoyama visits his wife Ryoko in hospital, where she dies from an undisclosed illness. Seven years later, Shigeharu's teenage son Shigehiko encourages him to find a new wife. Shigeharu's friend, film producer Yasuhisa Yoshikawa, organizes a fake casting audition at which young women audition for the starring role in a new television series, which was just a ruse for Shigeharu to meet aspiring actresses. Posing as a casting director, Shigeharu is immediately enchanted by an applicant named Asami Yamazaki, who says her career as a ballerina was ended by injuries. Yasuhisa is suspicious when he cannot reach any of the references in Asami's résumé, including a music producer who has gone missing 18 months earlier. Regardless, Shigeharu pursues her anyway. Asami lives in a tiny apartment, containing little more than a large sack and a telephone; she sits perfectly still next to the phone for four days after the audition, waiting for it to ring. When it finally does, she answers and pretends that she never expected Shigeharu to call. After several dates, she accompanies him to a hotel, where Shigeharu intends to propose marriage. She reveals burn scars on her body and, before having sex, demands that Shigeharu pledge his love to her. Deeply moved, he agrees. In the morning, Shigeharu receives a call from the front desk to inform him that Asami has left. Shigeharu tries to track down Asami, but all of the contacts on her résumé are dead ends, as Yasuhisa warned. At the dance studio where she said she trained, he finds a man with prosthetic feet who tortured her by burning her legs when she was a child. The bar where Asami said she worked has been abandoned for a year following the murder and dismemberment of the owner, and a local man tells Shigeharu that the police found an extra tongue, an extra ear, and three extra fingers when they recovered the body. Shigeharu has hallucinations of the body parts. Asami sneaks into Shigeharu's house while he is at work and becomes jealous when she sees a framed picture of Ryoko. She drugs his liquor and kills Gangu, the family dog. Shigeharu comes home, drinks the spiked liquor, and collapses. He has a series of hallucinations, including flashbacks to earlier dates with Asami and sexual experiences with other women from his past. In Asami's apartment, he sees that the sack contains a man who is missing both feet, his tongue, an ear, and three fingers on one hand. He crawls out and begs for food, prompting Asami to vomit into a dog bowl, which he hungrily consumes as Shigeharu watches in horror. He then sees her behead the man with prosthetic feet. When Shigeharu wakes up, Asami informs him he's been injected with a paralytic agent that disables his muscles but leaves him conscious and able to feel, and begins to torture him with acupuncture needles. She tells him that, just like everyone else, he has failed to love only her. She cannot tolerate his feelings for anyone else, even his own son. She inserts needles into his abdomen and below his eyes. She then cuts off his left foot with a wire saw. As she is halfway through cutting off his right foot, Shigehiko returns home from school and Asami attacks him. Shigeharu appears to suddenly wake up back in the hotel, his current ordeal apparently just a nightmare, though this is actually a false awakening. He proposes marriage to Asami, who accepts. As he falls back asleep, he returns to reality to find Shigehiko fighting Asami. Shigehiko overpowers Asami and kicks her down the stairs, breaking her neck. Shigeharu tells Shigehiko to call the police and stares across the room at the dying Asami, who repeats what she said on one of their dates about her excitement over seeing him again.

In the wintry Russian countryside of the early 1940s, Vladimir (Gregory Peck) leads a squad of partisan fighters operating behind German lines. The group's routines are disrupted when Nina (Tamara Toumanova), a ballerina, is brought to their hideout after becoming separated from her troupe. She confesses she has neither handled a gun nor learned to fight, cook, mend, or clean. Vladimir doubts she will be of any use. Later, a German soldier stumbles upon the group's lair but is captured. That night, he attempts an escape, but, at gunpoint, Nina shoots him, winning the approval of her new comrades. The next night, when the guerrillas carry out the sabotage of a German munitions train, Vladimir takes Nina along to be initiated. The operation is a success. Yet although she and Vladimir are becoming close, Nina is put off by his ruthlessness. He explains that before the war he, as an engineer, had to destroy the very hydroelectric power plant he had helped build in order to keep the enemy from using it. The couple's budding romance threatens the stability of the squad. At one point, when Vladimir must enlist someone to pass through Naxi lines to relay a coded message to his superior, he decides a woman would less likely be caught. He chooses the veteran Yelena (Maria Palmer), the only woman in the group besides Nina. When Yelena's horse returns to their hideout with blood on the saddle, Nina volunteers to take her place. Vladimir reluctantly accedes, sending the teen-aged boy Mitya (Glen Vernon) along with her. Upon delivering the message, she is given a coded reply: "The snow will fall tomorrow." This indicates that an anticipated massive Russian counterattack will begin the next day. Vladimir's superiors put him in charge of a merged partisan operation. Before the fighting begins, however, he orders Nina to take Mitya's younger sister, Olga (Dena Penn), to safety. Fighting bravely, the group's members are killed one by one, but Nina returns to Vladimir. As they fight on, he administers her the partisan oath of allegiance just before a German tank rolls atop their machine-gun nest and explodes.

The film begins with an interview of the older Roger Sharpe, with flashbacks to 1971.