A group of photographs of the Stella Maris College 's Old Christians Rugby Team are seen as Carlitos Páez points out several members of the team and reflects on the accident in a brief monologue. Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 flies over the Andes on October 13, 1972. The raucous rugby players and a few of their relatives and friends are eagerly looking forward to an upcoming match in Chile. Upon emerging from clouds, the plane encounters turbulence and collides with a mountain. The wings and tail are separated from the fuselage, which slides down a mountain slope before coming to a stop. Six passengers and one flight attendant are ejected from the plane and die. Antonio, the team captain, coordinates efforts to help the injured. Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino, both medical students, aid the injured. Another six passengers soon die, including both pilots and Nando's mother, Eugenia. Nando, who sustained a head injury, falls into a coma, and his sister Susana has suffered severe internal injuries. As the sun sets, the survivors make preparations for the night. Canessa discovers that the seat covers can be unzipped and used as blankets. The survivors go inside the fuselage and curl up beside one another to stay warm. Antonio, Roy Harley, and Rafael Cano plug the gaping hole at the end of the fuselage with luggage to keep out the wind. Two passengers die overnight. With nothing to hunt or gather on the mountain, Antonio declares they will use rationing when the survivors find a tin of chocolates and a case of wine. After seeing a plane fly past, they think it dipped its wings, and the survivors celebrate. Expecting to be rescued the next day, everyone except Javier, his wife Liliana, and Antonio finish the remaining chocolates. This causes a quarrel among Antonio and several others. Nando regains consciousness. After learning of his mother's death, Nando watches over Susana vigilantly. Knowing she will die of her injuries within a few days, he vows to set off on foot and find a way out of the mountains. When Carlitos reminds him that he will need food, Nando jokingly suggests eating the flesh of the deceased pilots to give him the strength to survive the journey to find help. Susana dies from her injuries. The survivors listen to a radio for word of their rescue but are devastated to hear that the search is to be called off after nine days. After great debate, the starving passengers decide to eat the flesh of their dead relatives and friends. Zerbino, Rafael, and Juan Martino set off to search for the tail of the plane in hopes of finding batteries for the plane's radio to transmit their location. Among pieces of the wreckage, the teammates find additional corpses, but return to the group with news that the tail of the plane is likely a little further away. Later in the week, an avalanche strikes the plane and fills much of the interior with snow. Eight of the survivors, including Antonio and Liliana, are smothered to death by the snow. The remaining 19 survivors are forced to stay inside the plane when they realize there is a blizzard outside. A second team, made up of Nando, Canessa, and Antonio "Tintin" Vizintin, sets out and finds the tail of the plane. Unable to bring the batteries to the fuselage, they return to the fuselage to get Roy, who is thought to have experience with electrical equipment. They bring him to the tail of the plane to see if he can fix the radio. When Roy is unsuccessful, the team decides to return to the fuselage. Federico and Alberto die from their injuries, as does Rafael, leading Nando to convince a reluctant Canessa to search for a way out of the mountains, taking Tintin with them. Two days into the journey, they send Tintin back to the fuselage so they can appropriate his rations and continue on their own. After a 12-day trek, the two escape the mountains and alert the authorities to their companions' location. Two helicopters, one of which has Nando and Canessa on board, appear overhead of the survivors on the mountain, leading the remaining 14 survivors to celebrate their impending rescue. In the present, Carlitos describes how a group later returned to the site of the crash and buried the corpses under a pile of stones, marked with a cross. The memorial to the 29 deceased and 16 survivors is shown.

Young photographer Nev Schulman lives with his brother Ariel in New York City. Abby Pierce, an 8-year-old child prodigy artist in rural Ishpeming, Michigan, sends Nev a painting of one of his photos. They become Facebook friends, which broadens to include Abby's family, including her mother Angela (Wesselman); Angela's husband Vince; and Abby's attractive and older half-sister Megan, who lives in Gladstone, Michigan. For a documentary, Ariel and Henry Joost film Nev as he begins an online relationship with Megan. She sends him MP3s of song covers she performs for him, but Nev discovers that they are all taken from performances on YouTube. He later finds evidence that Angela and Abby have lied about other details of Abby's art career. Ariel urges Nev to continue the relationship for the documentary, although Nev seems reluctant to carry on. The trio decide to travel to Michigan to make an impromptu appearance at the Pierces' house and confront Megan directly. As they arrive at the house, Angela takes some time to answer the door, but is welcoming and seems happy to finally meet Nev in person. She also tells him that she has recently begun chemotherapy for uterine cancer. After leaving multiple messages while trying to call Megan, Angela drives Nev and Ariel to see Abby herself. While talking with Abby and her friend alone, Nev learns that Abby never sees her sister and rarely paints. The next morning, Nev wakes up to a text message from Megan saying that she has had a long-standing alcohol problem and has decided to check into rehab and cannot meet him, which is confirmed by one of Megan's Facebook friends, but Nev realizes that this is likely another lie from Angela. After meeting with the family back at their house, Angela admits that the pictures of Megan were of a family friend, that her daughter Megan really is in rehab downstate and that Angela had really painted each of the paintings that she had sent to Nev. Nev thus realizes that, while believing he was talking to Megan, it was really Angela posing as her with an alternate Facebook account and mobile phone. As he sits for a drawing, Angela confesses that the various Facebook profiles were all maintained by her, but that through her friendship with Nev, she had reconnected with the world of painting, which had been her passion before she sacrificed her career to marry Vince—who has two severely mentally disabled children who require constant care. Through a conversation with Vince himself, the siblings learn that Angela had told him (falsely) that Nev was paying for her paintings, and that he had encouraged her to seize the opportunity to have him as a patron. Vince, talking with Nev, tells the story about how live cod were shipped along with catfish in the same tanks to keep the cod active, and thus ensure the quality of the fish. He further explains this as a metaphor on how there are people in everyone's lives who keep them alert, active, and always thinking, It is implied that he believes Angela to be such a person. Some time after, Nev receives a package labeled as being from Angela herself; it is the completed drawing that she labored over during their meeting, although Nev seems ambivalent in his feelings about it. On-screen text then informs the viewer that Angela did not have cancer, there was no Megan at the downstate rehab facility, and she doesn't know the girl in the pictures. Over the course of their nine-month correspondence, Angela and Nev exchanged more than 1,500 messages. It was revealed later that the girl in the pictures was Aimee Gonzales, a professional model and photographer, who lives in Vancouver, Washington, with her husband and two children. In October 2008, two months after the events, Ronald, one of Vince's twin sons, has died. Angela deactivated her 15 other profiles and changed her Facebook profile to a picture of herself, and now has a website to promote herself as an artist. Nev is still on Facebook and has more than 732 friends, including Angela.

Kate Dibiasky, a doctoral candidate in astronomy at Michigan State University, discovers a previously unknown comet. Her adviser, Dr. Randall Mindy, confirms that it will collide with Earth in approximately six months and is large enough to cause a global extinction event. NASA verifies the findings, and Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe, head of their Planetary Defense Coordination Office, accompanies Dibiasky and Mindy to present their findings to the White House. However, they are met with apathy from President Janie Orlean and her Chief of Staff Jason Orlean, who is also her son. Oglethorpe encourages Dibiasky and Mindy to leak the news to the media, which they then do on The Daily Rip, a popular morning talk show. When hosts Jack Bremmer and Brie Evantee treat the topic flippantly, Dibiasky loses her temper and angrily rants about the threat before leaving. Mindy receives public approval for his looks, while Dibiasky becomes the subject of negative memes for her on-air behavior. Public reaction is muted, and the announcement is downplayed by NASA Director Jocelyn Calder, a top donor to Orlean with no background in astronomy. When Orlean's sexual relations with Supreme Court nominee Sheriff Conlon become news, the president tries to divert public attention to the looming threat of the comet, announcing a project to use nuclear weapons to strike and divert the comet. The mission successfully launches, but Orlean abruptly aborts it when Peter Isherwell, the billionaire CEO of BASH Cellular and another top donor, discovers that the comet contains trillions of dollars' worth of rare-earth elements. The White House agrees to commercially exploit the comet by fragmenting and recovering it from the ocean, using technology proposed by BASH in a scheme that has not undergone peer review. Orlean sidelines Dibiasky and Oglethorpe while hiring Mindy as the National Science Advisor. Dibiasky attempts to mobilize public opposition to the scheme but gives up under threat from Orlean's administration. Mindy becomes a prominent voice advocating for the comet's commercial opportunities and begins an affair with Evantee. World opinion is divided among people who believe the comet is a severe threat, those who decry alarmism and believe that mining a destroyed comet will create jobs, and those who deny that the comet even exists. When Dibiasky returns home to Illinois, her parents kick her out of the house and she begins a relationship with a young man named Yule, a skateboarder, shoplifter, and Evangelical she meets at her retail job. Mindy's wife comes to Washington to confront him about his infidelity, but returns to Michigan without him. Mindy questions whether Isherwell's technology will be able to break apart the comet, angering the billionaire. Becoming frustrated with the administration, Mindy finally breaks down and rants on The Daily Rip, criticizing Orlean for downplaying the impending apocalypse and questioning humanity's indifference. Cut off from the administration, Mindy reconciles with Dibiasky as the comet becomes visible from Earth. Mindy, Dibiasky, and Oglethorpe organize a protest campaign on social media, telling people to "Just Look Up" and call on other countries to conduct comet interception operations. Simultaneously, Orlean starts an anti-campaign telling people "Don't Look Up". Oglethorpe informs Mindy and Dibiasky that Orlean and BASH cut Russia, India, and China out of the rights for the comet-mining deal, so those countries prepared their own joint deflection mission—only for their spacecraft to explode on takeoff, ending the possibility of a successful deflection. As the comet becomes larger in the sky, Orlean's supporters start turning on her administration. BASH's launches aimed at breaking the comet apart go awry, and everyone, beginning with Isherwell and Orlean in the flight control center, soon realizes that humanity is doomed. Isherwell, Orlean, and other elites board a sleeper spaceship designed to find an Earth-like planet; unthinkingly, Orlean leaves her son Jason behind. Orlean offers Mindy two places on the ship, but he declines, choosing to spend a final evening with his wife and children, and friends Oglethorpe, Dibiasky, and Yule. As expected, the comet strikes off the coast of Chile, causing a worldwide disaster and triggering an explosive extinction-level event, with globally catastrophic scenes being shown prior to the obliteration of the Mindy family gathering. In a mid-credits scene, Orlean, Isherwell and the surviving people who left Earth land on a lush alien planet 22,740 years later. Exiting naked and admiring the habitable world, Orlean is suddenly killed by a large, bird-like creature—a death predicted earlier by BASH's algorithms—and a further pack of the creatures surrounds and begins to converge on the planetary newcomers. In a post-credits scene on Earth, Jason emerges from the rubble, having survived the impact. He records himself, declaring himself the "last man on Earth", and asking any viewers still alive to "like and subscribe".

In 1969, student hackers and long-time friends Martin Brice and Cosmo use their skills to reallocate money from causes they consider evil to underfunded ones that help the world. When Martin steps out to get pizza, the police arrive and arrest Cosmo, forcing Martin into hiding. Decades later in San Francisco, Martin, now living under the alias Martin Bishop, leads a penetration testing security team that includes former CIA operative Donald Crease, technician and conspiracy theorist Darren "Mother" Roskow, hacking prodigy Carl Arbogast, and blind phone phreaker Irwin "Whistler" Emery. NSA agents approach Martin and reveal they know his true identity. They offer to clear his record if he recovers a Russian-funded black box device, codenamed Setec Astronomy, from mathematician Gunter Janek. With help from ex-girlfriend Liz, Martin and his team steal the device, only to discover it is a codebreaker capable of penetrating even the most secure networks. Realizing that "Setec Astronomy" is an anagram of "too many secrets", Crease locks everyone in the office until it can be handed over to the NSA. The next day, Martin delivers the box to the agents but flees after learning Janek was murdered the night before. The team realizes the box was actually funded by the NSA and that the supposed agents are impostors. Martin's friend Gregor, a Russian consulate spy, identifies one as a former NSA agent now working for a crime syndicate. Men posing as FBI agents arrive, kill Gregor with Martin's gun to frame him, and abduct Martin. He awakens in an unknown location, where the impostors are revealed to be working for Cosmo. Released early from prison for his hacking skills, Cosmo was recruited by the syndicate to manage its illicit finances. He wants the box to complete what he and Martin began in 1969: erasing financial and ownership records to make the rich and poor equals. He invites Martin to join him, but Martin rejects the plan as too extreme. In retaliation, Cosmo uses the box to access FBI systems, exposing Martin's identities and branding him a fugitive once more. Martin and his team contact NSA operations director Bernard Abbott, who agrees to help if they can recover the box. Using sounds Martin recalls from his abduction, Whistler pinpoints Cosmo's office inside the PlayTronics toy company. While researching the building's security, the team identifies employee Werner Brandes and manipulates a dating service to pair him with Liz. During their date, she steals his access codes, allowing Martin to infiltrate PlayTronics. Brandes grows suspicious and takes Liz to his office, where Cosmo realizes her link to Martin. He locks down the facility and takes her hostage. Martin surrenders and hands over the box, but again rejects Cosmo's plea to join him. The group escapes and exits the building, only to be confronted by Cosmo again. Unable to kill his old friend, Cosmo lets Martin and the team leave, only to discover Martin has given him an empty box. Back at their office, Martin's team is confronted by Abbott and his agents. Martin realizes the box could be used by the NSA to infiltrate U.S. systems such as the FBI and the White House. To secure their silence, Abbott agrees to their demands: clearing Martin's record, funding a vacation for Crease and his wife, buying Mother a Winnebago, and giving Carl the phone number of an attractive NSA agent. After the agents depart, Martin reveals the box is useless; he has removed its core component. A news report announces the sudden bankruptcy of the Republican National Committee and the simultaneous receipt of large anonymous donations to Amnesty International, Greenpeace, and the United Negro College Fund.

In Montreal, scientist André Delambre is found dead with his head and arm crushed in a hydraulic press. His wife Hélène confesses to the crime but refuses to provide a motive, and begins acting strangely. In particular, she is obsessed with flies, including a supposedly white-headed fly. André's brother, François, lies and says he caught the white-headed fly. Thinking he knows the truth, Hélène asks François to bring the police inspector in charge of the case, Charas, so that she can explain the circumstances of André's death to them both. In flashback, André, Hélène, and their son Philippe are a happy family. André has been working on a matter-transporter device called the disintegrator-integrator. He initially tests it only on small, inanimate objects, such as a newspaper, before proceeding to living creatures, including the family's pet cat (which fails to reintegrate, but can be heard meowing somewhere) and a guinea pig. After he is satisfied that these tests are succeeding, he builds a man-sized pair of chambers. One day, Hélène, worried because André has not come up from the basement lab for a couple of days, goes down to find André with a black cloth draped over his head and a strange deformity on his left hand. Communicating only with typed notes and knocking (once for "Yes", twice for "No"), André tells Hélène that he tried to transport himself, but that a fly was caught in the chamber with him, which resulted in the mixing of their atoms. Now, he has the head and left arm of a fly, though he retains his human mind. Conversely, the fly has a miniature version of his head and left arm. André needs Hélène to capture the fly so that he can reverse the process. After she, her son, and their housemaid exhaustively search for it, she finds it, but it slips out of a crack in the window. André's will begins to fade as the fly's instincts take over his brain. Time is running out, and while André can still think like a human, he smashes the equipment, burns his notes, and leads Hélène to the factory. When they arrive, he sets the hydraulic press, puts his head and arm under, and motions for Hélène to push the button. André's arm falls free as the press descends, and trying not to look, she raises the press, replaces the arm, and activates the machine a second time. Upon hearing this confession, Inspector Charas deems Hélène insane and guilty of murder. As they are about to haul her away, Philippe tells François he has seen the fly trapped in a web in the back garden. François convinces the inspector to come and see for himself. The two men see the fly, with both André's head and arm, trapped on the web as Philippe told them. It screams, "Help me! Help me!" as a large spider advances on it. Just as the spider is about to devour the creature, Charas crushes them both with a rock. Knowing that nobody would believe the truth, François and Charas decide to declare André's death a suicide so that Hélène is not convicted of murder. In the end, Hélène, François, and Philippe resume their daily lives. Sometime later, Philippe and Hélène are playing croquet in the yard. François arrives to take his nephew to the zoo. In reply to his nephew's query about his father's death, François tells Philippe, "He was searching for the truth. He almost found a great truth, but for one instant, he was careless. The search for the truth is the most important work in the whole world and the most dangerous." The film closes with Hélène escorting her son and François out of the yard.

In 1980s Germany at the height of the Cold War, 19-year-old Karl Koch finds the world around him threatening and chaotic. Inspired by the fictitious character Hagbard Celine (from Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea 's 1975 book The Illuminatus! Trilogy), he starts investigating the backgrounds of political and economic power and discovers signs that make him believe in a worldwide conspiracy. At a meeting of the Chaos Computer Club, Karl gets to know the student David. David and Karl are able to hack into the global data network — still in its early stages — and their belief in social justice propels them into espionage for the KGB. Driven by contacts with a drug dealer—and by increasing KGB pressure to hack into foreign systems—Karl spirals into a cocaine dependency and grows increasingly alienated from David. In a drug-addled state, Karl begins to sit in front of his computer for days at a time. Perpetually sleepless, he also grows increasingly delusional. When David publicly reveals the espionage activity in which the two men have been engaged, Karl is left alone to face the consequences. Collapse soon follows. Karl is taken to a hospital to deal with his drug addiction and mysteriously dies after his supposed hacking of Chernobyl.

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.

David is escorted to a hotel after his wife leaves him for another man. The hotel manager reveals that single people have 45 days to find a partner or they will be transformed into an animal of their choice (the dog accompanying David is his brother Bob). David is set on becoming a lobster, should he fail. David makes the acquaintance of Robert, a man with a lisp, and John, a man with a limp. Guests are fixated on finding a mate with whom they share superficial traits such as minor ailments, which they believe to be the key to compatibility. The hotel has many rules and rituals: masturbation is banned, but sexual stimulation by the hotel maid is mandatory, and guests attend dances and watch propaganda extolling the advantages of partnership. Residents can extend their deadline by hunting and tranquilizing the single people who live in the forest, with each captured " loner " earning them an additional day. On the way to a hunt, a woman with a fondness for butter biscuits offers David sexual favours, which he declines. She tells him that if she fails to find a mate, she will kill herself by jumping from a hotel window. John wins the affections of a woman with constant nosebleeds by purposely smashing his nose in secret. They move to the couples' section to begin a month-long trial partnership. David later decides to court a notoriously cruel woman who has tranquilized more loners than anyone else. Their initial conversation is accompanied by the screams of the biscuit-loving woman, who has injured herself by jumping from a first floor window. David pretends to enjoy the woman's suffering to gain the heartless woman's interest. He later joins her in a hot tub where she feigns choking on an olive to test him. Noticing that he makes no attempt to help her, she decides that they are a match, and the two are shifted to the couples' suite. David wakes up one morning and finds she has killed Bob. As David tearfully mourns him, she concludes that their relationship is a lie and attempts to drag him to the hotel manager to have him turned into the "animal that no one wants to be" as punishment. He escapes and, with the help of a sympathetic maid (later revealed as a mole working for the loners), tranquilizes his partner and transforms her into an unspecified animal. David escapes the hotel and joins the loners in the woods. In contrast to the hotel, they forbid any kind of romance, which is punishable by mutilation. David, who is short-sighted, begins a secret relationship with a woman who is also short-sighted. They develop a gestural language they use to communicate. They are taken on covert missions to the nearby city, where their cover requires them to appear as husband and wife, which they secretly enjoy. Because they have the required superficial traits in common and genuinely enjoy each other's company, they make a plan to leave the loners and rejoin society. The loners launch a raid to sabotage the hotel. David tells the woman with nosebleeds that John has been faking his. Other loners hold the hotel manager and her husband at gunpoint, tricking him into shooting his wife to save himself, but the gun is not loaded. They leave the couple to face each other. The leader of the loners obtains the short-sighted woman's journal and discovers David's plan to escape with her. The leader and the maid take the woman to the city, ostensibly to have an operation to cure her short-sightedness, but instead have her blinded. The woman attempts to stab the leader, but the leader uses the maid as a human shield and pretends to die when the woman stabs the maid to death. David and the woman try to find something else that they have in common, to no avail. One morning, David overpowers the leader, leaving her tied up in an open grave to be eaten alive by wild dogs. He and the blind woman escape to the city and stop at a restaurant. David goes to the restroom and hesitantly prepares to blind himself with a steak knife.

The scientist Ludvík Jahn returns to his hometown after two decades away. He is interviewed by Helena, an attractive older woman whom he begins to seduce. Jahn then discovers Helena is married to Pavel, an old rival. Jahn flashes back to his college days and his love for Markéta, a devout believer in communism. In an attempt to make the humorless Markéta lighten up, Jahn sends her a postcard reading "Optimism is the opium of mankind. A 'healthy spirit' stinks of stupidity. Long live Trotsky! Yours, Ludvík". Markéta turns the postcard over to the Party, however, and Jahn is brought before a Party hearing to answer for his words. Pavel, a friend who had pledged to help him, calls in the meeting for Jahn's expulsion from the college and the Communist Party, and Markéta joins the vote against him. Jahn then undergoes six years of "reeducation", which are split between prison and army service in a technical auxiliary battalion under a sadistic drill sergeant. While in the army, Alexej, a true believer in communism, appeals to higher authorities against their treatment; when the man is consequently expelled from the Party, he commits suicide. In the present, Jahn successfully seduces Helena, motivated more by a desire for revenge on Pavel than attraction to her. Though Helena falls in love with him, he discovers that she and Pavel have long been estranged, and Pavel has a new lover of his own. The only person hurt by Jahn's attempt at revenge is Helena.

In 2008, an investment bank begins laying off a large number of employees, among them Eric Dale, the head of risk management. Dale's attempts to speak about the implications of a model he is working on are ignored. On his way out, he gives Peter Sullivan, an analyst in his department, a flash drive containing his work, warning him to "be careful". Sullivan, intrigued, works after hours to complete Dale's model. Sullivan discovers that the assumptions underpinning the firm's risk profile are wrong; historical volatility levels in MBSs are being exceeded, so the firm's position in those assets is over-leveraged and the debt incurred from those over-leveraged assets could bankrupt the company. Sullivan calls his colleague, junior analyst Seth Bregman, to return to work with the head of credit trading, Will Emerson. Emerson, in turn, summons Sam Rogers, his boss, after reviewing Sullivan's findings. They are unable to contact Dale because his company phone has been disabled. Sullivan and Bregman go out to find Dale, while Rogers and Emerson inform the company's senior management of the situation. A meeting of division head Jared Cohen, CRMO Sarah Robertson, and other senior executives concludes that Sullivan's findings are accurate, and CEO John Tuld is called. Upon Tuld's arrival, and after Sullivan explains the problem, Rogers, Cohen, and Tuld spar regarding a course of action: Cohen's plan, favored by Tuld, is a fire sale of the problematic assets. Rogers disagrees, pointing out that the sale will damage the firm's relationships and reputation within the industry and cause major instability in the markets. Tuld stresses that his desire to avoid the firm's bankruptcy is worth that cost. After the meeting with Tuld, Emerson learns from Dale's wife that he has returned home. Emerson travels to Dale's residence with Bregman and attempts to persuade him to return to the firm, but he refuses. During the drive back, Bregman asks whether he will lose his job; Emerson responds that he likely will but, philosophizing about the nature of financial markets, tells him not to lose faith and that his work is necessary. Tuld tells Robertson that he will assign the blame to her in front of the traders and the board of directors; Robertson argues that she warned Tuld and Cohen about the situation over a year ago and that both acknowledged the risks, but she fails to persuade Tuld. Meanwhile, Dale is bribed and forced into cooperating with Cohen's plan, with the firm threatening to cut his benefits and severance if he refuses. He spends the day commiserating with Robertson. Despite his misgivings, Rogers rallies his traders and informs them of the fire sale. He acknowledges the damage likely to be done to their reputations and careers but tells them that they will receive seven-figure bonuses if most of the traders' assigned assets are sold by day's end. As trading progresses, the firm elicits suspicion and, eventually, anger from its counterparties and incurs heavy losses, but it manages to sell off most of the bad assets. Another round of layoffs begins; upon learning he was spared, Rogers confronts Tuld and submits his resignation. Tuld dismisses Rogers' view of the situation by recalling past economic crises, arguing that such events always happen and that Rogers should not feel guilty for acting in his and the firm's interests. Tuld asks Rogers to stay on for two more years, and Rogers reluctantly accepts, citing his personal financial need. Tuld also informs Rogers that Sullivan will be promoted.

Joe, Al, and Willie are three senior citizens who share a small apartment in Queens, New York City. Their days are spent on a park bench, and Joe is desperate to break the monotony. One day Joe suggests that they go on a "stick-up". They have no experience as criminals, but after some reluctance, the two others agree. Al surreptitiously borrows three pistols from the gun collection of his nephew Pete, who lives with his wife Kathy and two children Colleen and Kevin a few miles away. The trio, disguised with novelty glasses, pulls off the heist, netting $35,000. The excitement is too much for Willie, who soon suffers a fatal heart attack. Joe and Al give $25,000 to Pete and his family, claiming it is the proceeds from Willie's life insurance policy. They decide to splurge the remaining $10,000 on a trip to Las Vegas. Al and Joe win over $70,000 playing craps, but the trip, which they make right after Willie's funeral, exhausts Al and he dies in his sleep. Joe informs Pete that his uncle has died, then tells him about the bank heist and the Las Vegas adventure. He gives Pete the remaining bank loot and the Vegas winnings and tells him to store the cash in his safe deposit box and never tell anyone about it. The next day, on his way to Al's funeral, Joe is arrested. He confesses to the robbery but refuses to say what happened to the money. Pete visits Joe in prison and suggests giving back at least the stolen portion of the money in the hope of a lighter sentence. Joe explains that he is an old man with no family and, now, no friends, and is resigned to his fate. He tells Pete to enjoy his "inheritance", but while heading back to his cell, cheekily suggests that he plans to break out.