In 1962, during the Cold War, Elisa Esposito works as a janitor in a secret government laboratory in Baltimore, Maryland. Found abandoned by the side of a river as an infant with scars on her neck, Elisa is mute and communicates through sign language. Her only friends are her closeted middle-aged neighbor Giles, an advertising illustrator, and her coworker Zelda. Colonel Richard Strickland has captured a creature from a South American river and taken it to the facility for study. Elisa discovers it is a humanoid amphibian, and bonds with the creature after visiting him in secret. Seeking an advantage in the Space Race, Strickland persuades General Frank Hoyt to vivisect the Amphibian Man to examine his respiratory system. Scientist Robert Hoffstetler, a Soviet spy, pleads with Strickland to keep him alive for further study, while being ordered by his handlers to kill the creature. Giles reluctantly agrees to help Elisa free Amphibian Man after failing a work assignment and being rejected by a local restaurant manager whom he discovered was both racist and homophobic. Hoffstetler and Zelda also become involved in the plot and successfully get the Amphibian Man to Elisa's apartment. Elisa keeps him in her bathtub, planning to release him into a nearby canal when heavy rain allows access to the ocean. When Giles tries to stop the Amphibian Man from devouring one of his cats, his arm is slashed and the Amphibian Man flees. Elisa coaxes him back to her apartment and the creature touches Giles on his balding head and wounded arm. The next morning, Giles discovers his hair is regrowing and the wounds on his arm have healed. Elisa's infatuation with the Amphibian Man culminates in sexual intercourse. General Hoyt gives Strickland an ultimatum to recover the Amphibian Man or his career will be over. Hoffstetler is told by his handlers he'll be extracted from the US in two days. The Amphibian Man's health begins to deteriorate. Strickland follows Hoffstetler to a meeting with his handlers where Hoffstetler is shot. Strickland intervenes, shooting the handlers, then tortures the dying spy into revealing the Amphibian Man's whereabouts. Strickland confronts Zelda in her home and her husband reveals Elisa has the Amphibian Man. Zelda warns Elisa to release the creature before Strickland can arrive. He ransacks Elisa's apartment and finds evidence of the creature in the bathtub and a calendar note revealing where she plans to release him. "Unable to perceive the shape of You. I find You all around me. Your presence fills my eyes with Your love. It humbles my heart. For You are everywhere." Elisa and Giles are bidding farewell to the creature at the canal when Strickland arrives, knocks Giles down, and shoots both the Amphibian Man and Elisa. Giles and Strickland fight while the Amphibian Man heals himself, then fatally slashes Strickland's throat. As the police arrive with Zelda, the Amphibian Man jumps into the canal with the unconscious Elisa and kisses her. When he uses his healing power again, the scars on her neck open to reveal gills. The now-amphibious Elisa revives and embraces him.

At the end of their high school senior year, noble underachiever Lloyd Dobler is smitten with valedictorian Diane Court. He plans to ask her out, although they belong to different social groups. Lloyd's parents are stationed in Germany in the U.S. Army, so he lives with his sister Constance, a single mother, and still has no plans for his future. Diane comes from a sheltered academic upbringing, living with her doting divorced father Jim, who owns the retirement home where she works. She will take up a prestigious fellowship in England at the end of the summer. Lloyd offers to take Diane to their graduation party. She agrees, to everyone's surprise. Their next "date" is a dinner at Diane's, where Lloyd fails to impress Jim, and IRS agents arrive unexpectedly to inform the latter he is under scrutiny for tax fraud. Diane introduces Lloyd to the retirement home residents and he teaches her to drive her manual transmission Ford Tempo graduation gift. They grow closer and lose their virginity together in the car, to her father's concern. Lloyd's musician best friend Corey, who has never overcome her unfaithful ex-boyfriend Joe, warns him to take care of Diane. Jim urges Diane to break up with Lloyd, feeling he is not an appropriate match, and suggests she give him a pen as a parting gift. Worried about her father, Diane tells Lloyd she wants to stop seeing him and concentrate on her studies, giving him the pen. Devastated, he seeks advice from Corey, who tells him to "be a man" because it takes more to be a "man" rather than just being a "guy". Meanwhile, Jim discovers his credit cards are declined as the investigation continues. At dawn, Lloyd stands under Diane's open bedroom window and plays " In Your Eyes " by Peter Gabriel on a boombox, which played when they were intimate. The next day, she meets with an IRS investigator, who says they have evidence incriminating Jim with embezzling funds from his retirement home residents. He suggests she accept the fellowship as matters with her father will only worsen. Diane finds the cash concealed at home and confronts Jim, who tells her he took it to give her financial independence. He feels justified in doing so, insisting he provided better care of his residents than their families. Distraught, Diane reconciles with Lloyd at his kickboxing gym. At the end of the summer, Jim is incarcerated on a nine-month sentence after accepting a plea deal. Lloyd visits him at the prison, saying he is accompanying Diane to England. Jim reacts angrily when Lloyd gives him a letter from Diane, but she arrives to say goodbye and they embrace. She gives Jim the pen he had suggested she give to Lloyd, asking him to write to her in England. Lloyd supports and comforts Diane, who is afraid of flying, on their flight.

British diplomat and avid horticulturalist Justin Quayle is confronted by Amnesty International activist Tessa during a lecture in London. They strike up a romance, and marry after she accompanies him to his posting in Kenya. She befriends Belgian doctor Arnold Bluhm, leading to rumours of an affair. Tessa has no qualms confronting corruption, to the chagrin of Justin's superiors, and she loses a child late in pregnancy. Tessa and Arnold connect recent local deaths to drug trials being conducted by the Kenyan-based company Three Bees using the drug Dypraxa. They write a damaging report on the drug and Tessa gives it to Justin's colleague Sandy Woodrow, the British High Commissioner, who sends it to Sir Bernard Pellegrin, head of the Africa Desk at the Foreign Office. Pellegrin responds with an incriminating letter to Sandy, which Tessa persuades him to show her, and she steals it before departing for Lokichogio with Arnold. Sandy informs Justin that a white woman and black driver have been killed near Lake Turkana, and that Tessa and Arnold shared a room at Lodwar before hiring a car. Justin and Sandy identify Tessa's mutilated body, but Arnold's whereabouts remain unknown. Police confiscate Tessa's computer and files, but Justin finds her keepsake box, containing a letter from Sandy declaring his love for her and asking her to return Pellegrin's letter, and records of Three Bees' tests. After Tessa's burial, Justin learns from his colleague Ghita that Tessa kept Arnold's secret that he was gay, as homosexuality is illegal in Kenya. Pursuing the truth about his wife's murder, he follows the trail of her report. Justin is briefly detained by police and confronts Three Bees' CEO Kenny Curtiss, but receives no answers. Returning to London, Justin's passport is confiscated. He dines with Pellegrin, who lies that Arnold must have murdered Tessa, and believes that Justin has his incriminating letter. Justin meets with Tessa's cousin and lawyer Ham, and they access her computer files to reveal her investigation into Dypraxa and its manufacturer, Swiss - Canadian pharmaceutical conglomerate KDH, which hired Three Bees to test the drug on unsuspecting Kenyans as a treatment for tuberculosis. Justin receives a threatening note and Ham provides him with a fake passport to travel to Germany to meet with Tessa's contact Birgit. She is part of a pharmaceutical watchdog group and is reluctant to speak due to the targeting of her group. Justin is attacked in his hotel room and warned to stop investigating. Arnold's body is found having been tortured to death, while the announcement of a safe Dypraxa causes KDH's share price to soar. Returning to Kenya, Justin confronts Sandy, who admits that Tessa's report was silenced to save KDH from spending millions redeveloping the drug. Justin is approached by Curtiss, who has been betrayed by KDH, and brought to a mass grave of Dypraxa test subjects. Curtiss points Justin to Dr Lorbeer, Dypraxa's inventor, who has fled to Sudan. Tim Donohue, a friend in British intelligence, confirms that Pellegrin had Tessa and Arnold killed. Unable to convince Justin to return home, he gives him a gun. Justin travels to confront Lorbeer, who is treating remote villagers to atone for the lives claimed by his drug. The village is attacked by raiders, but Justin and Lorbeer escape in a UN aid plane, and Lorbeer reveals that he has Pellegrin's letter. Tessa convinced him to record the truth about Dypraxa, but he changed his mind, instead informing KDH that Tessa and Arnold were en route to expose the company to the UN. Justin convinces the pilot to mail Pellegrin's letter to Ham, and to drop him off at Lake Turkana. Removing the bullets from his gun, his final thoughts are of Tessa before he is killed by KDH's henchmen. In London at Tessa and Justin's memorial service, Pellegrin lies that Justin committed suicide in the same place his wife died. Ham announces the reading of an epistle, but instead reads Pellegrin's letter, exposing the deaths caused by Dypraxa and the subsequent coverup. Pellegrin storms out as Ham implicates the British government, KDH, and public complacency regarding the human cost of medicine they take for granted.

The story concerns the tribulations of Martin, a blind photographer. Through a series of flashbacks, Martin is shown as a child, distrustful of his own mother. She describes to him the garden outside his bedroom window. She tells him that someone is raking leaves, but he cannot hear the sound and angrily decides she is lying to him. This childhood experience strongly affects Martin as an adult, as he anticipates that sighted people will take advantage of his blindness to lie to him, or worse yet, pity him. He has become a resentful, vaguely bitter person who spends his days taking some photographs of the world around him, then having various people describe them. He uses these photographs and the Braille descriptions before he stamps on them as "proof" that the world around him really is as others describe it to him. He also takes secret pleasure in rebuking the romantic advances of Celia, his housekeeper. Celia harbours a deep-seated and obsessive crush on Martin, as evidenced by the scores of photographs of him adorning the walls of her flat, and takes out her frustration at her unrequited love by tormenting Martin in small ways, such as rearranging the furniture in his house. Martin keeps Celia around because her love and hatred of him means he knows she cannot pity him. One day Martin encounters Andy, and is pleased with the depth and detail with which Andy describes his photos. The two fast become close friends, and Martin soon comes to trust him implicitly. The jealous Celia is threatened by Andy's increasing presence in Martin's life. She seduces Andy, and Martin catches the two in the act, before Andy reluctantly lies to him about it. Celia recognizes this opportunity to foil Martin yet again, and sets up a series of events leading Martin to discover Andy's dishonesty. Martin is devastated and plunged into a deep despair, and breaks off his friendship with Andy. Later on, Andy confronts him, and tries to convince him that everyone has flaws, and should not be judged on such simple terms. "People lie," he tells Martin, "but not all the time. And that's the point." Martin does not respond, but is swayed by Andy's impassioned words. Near the story's conclusion, Martin decides to fire Celia, but acknowledges his own role in purposely antagonizing her in their love-hate relationship. Despite his openness she is extremely angry that her efforts have gone to waste, and when asked to return her key to Martin's house, she throws it in a sink full of water. Finally, Martin asks Andy to describe one last photo for him, one he has kept locked away for years. Martin had previously told Andy that this was the first and most important photo he had ever taken. It is a photo of the garden from Martin's childhood, taken moments after his mother described it on that fateful day. However, Andy's detailed description includes the iconic man raking leaves Martin's mother told him about, that he had rejected for all these years. This revelation provides Martin with his proof and emotional release.

Jean Fournier is a quiet young bank employee in Paris, living with his widowed father. After accompanying his colleague Caron to a casino and winning at roulette, he decides to have a holiday on the French Riviera, despite his father's warning that gamblers always lose in the end. In the casino in Nice, he meets Jackie Demaistre, a middle-aged woman who has left her husband and infant son to pursue her compulsion. The two develop an emotional connection, though she warns him that she will sacrifice anything to keep on gambling, not for the money, she claims, but for the thrill. As her remaining belongings are in a suitcase at the railway station, where she plans to sleep, he offers her his hotel room. They drink, talk, and make love. Back in the casino, the two win a fortune with which, having bought a sports car and smart clothes, they take a suite in Monte Carlo and hit the tables there. Losing everything, they take the train back to Nice, where Jean convinces his father to send him some money. When this too is lost in the casino, Jean calls it a day and walks off, saying that he is returning to Paris. Hurt at this double rejection, of her and of their gambling partnership, Jackie angrily tells him to go. Shortly afterwards, she runs after him and the two embrace in the sunset.

Cassiel and Raphaella, two angels, observe the busy life of reunited Berlin. Due to their divine origin, they can hear the thoughts of the people around them, and try to console a dying man. Cassiel has been following his friend Damiel (a former angel), who senses his presence and talks about his experiences as a human. He owns a pizza parlor named Casa dell'angelo (Angel's House) and has married Marion, a trapeze artist whom he met when he was an angel. She works in a local bar in West Berlin, and the two have a young daughter, Doria. Cassiel follows Raissa Becker, an 11-year-old girl who lives in the former East Berlin. He observes her life and notices that she and her mother Hanna Becker are being followed by Philip Winter, a detective who works for Anton Baker. Baker is an American arms dealer and pornographer who owns a transport company. Cassiel follows Becker and Winter into an abandoned building. As Raphaella and Cassiel sit on top of the Brandenburg Gate, he expresses a desire to experience human life. Visiting Raissa, he finds her alone at her flat and leaning over the balcony railing. As she falls, Cassiel tries to save her and suddenly becomes human, catching the child. He has to adjust to the transformation, learning to modulate the volume of his voice and to negotiate streets and avoid being hit by cars. His only possession is an angel's armor, which became tangible when he leaped into humanity. In the subway, Cassiel is tricked into gambling by Emit Flesti ('Time Itself'), losing his armor and money won during the game. Raphaella begs Flesti to give Cassiel time to understand what it is to be a human; he agrees but does not promise to stop hunting him. Arrested and detained, Cassiel struggles to satisfy police demands for identification. He cannot give (or comprehend) his name or address, but refers the police to his friend's pizza shop. Damiel arrives at the station and takes his now human friend home. Tricked by Flesti into drinking alcohol, he becomes addicted and robs a shop with a gun taken from a teenager, who had been planning to kill his abusive stepfather. Cassiel begins begging to make his way and feigns a car accident with Baker to compel him to pay for the forging of a passport and birth certificate he has ordered under the name Karl Engel (Charles Angel). Baker hires Cassiel as his valet, to pass him cards for cheating his fellow gangsters at poker. Stopping by Casa dell'Angelo to return items borrowed from Damiel, Cassiel encounters Flesti again. He is collecting money from Damiel, after having loaned him money to set up the business. After Cassiel saves Baker's life, Baker makes Cassiel his partner. But after learning the true nature of his business, Cassiel decides to leave Baker's service and stop him. Winter is killed by Flesti. With the help of Damiel and former angel Peter Falk, Cassiel gets into Baker's airport storage area. His team takes all the weapons and destroy the pornography copying machines. They send the weapons to a barge owned by other friends. Once having completed the plan, Cassiel feels ready to live as a human, but Flesti reports that Baker's rival, Patzke, has hijacked the barge with Baker's and Cassiel's friends inside. Becker is also captured and reunites with his sister, Hannah, on board. Flesti reveals himself as Time and says that he has to make Cassiel understand he does not belong in the human world; he has a word written on his forehead. At a boat lift, Cassiel gets on the barge and frees Raissa, moments before he is killed. Flesti slows time so the rest can take over the barge and save the entire party. Cassiel's friends are saddened by his death, but when Damiel hears a ring in his ear, he understands that Cassiel has been reinstated as an angel and is near, and Damiel laughs in joy.

During Manhattan debutante season, middle-class Princeton student Tom Townsend attends a deb ball on a whim. A mix-up over a taxi home introduces him to a small group of young Upper East Side socialites known as the Sally Fowler Rat Pack, after the girl whose fancy apartment they use for afterparties. The Rat Pack invites him to the night's afterparty to prevent ill feelings. At the afterparty, Tom befriends several Rat Pack members, including Nick, a cynic who takes Tom under his wing; Audrey, a shy girl who enjoys Regency-era literature and develops a crush on Tom; and Charlie, a philosophical friend with an unrequited crush on Audrey. Tom learns that he and the Rat Pack have some common friends, including his ex-girlfriend Serena, with whom he remains infatuated. Under Nick's tutelage, Tom ingratiates himself with the Rat Pack. Although he initially sticks out due to his left-wing, Fourierist views, he fits into the social crowd and becomes a full-fledged member. Much of the film is composed of dialogues in which the Rat Pack discuss their nebulous social scene and uncertain futures. They worry that they are coming of age just as the culture in which they were raised is ending. One reason Tom fits in is that his social cachet trumps his wealth. He attended the Pomfret boarding school at the same time that Serena went to Farmington with several Rat Pack girls. Nick explains that the Rat Pack needs Tom because there is a shortage of socially respectable young men to escort debutantes to formal events. Although the Rat Pack welcomes him, Tom harbors a love–hate relationship with wealth and the upper class. His wealthy father abandoned the family to marry another woman, forcing Tom and his mother to move into a middle-class apartment on the Upper West Side. Tom slowly realizes that he is in denial about his distant relationship with his father. Serena has been dating Rick Von Sloneker, a young, titled aristocrat notorious for his womanizing. Nick resents Rick and accuses him of getting a girl drunk and convincing her to " pull a train " several years ago, after which she committed suicide. When Rick confronts him, Nick admits that his story is a "composite" of incidents from Rick's life. He insists that it is based on real events, but the Rat Pack is scandalized. As debutante season ends, the Rat Pack unravels. Nick leaves Manhattan. During a parlor game, Tom admits he loves Serena and not Audrey. In response, Audrey leaves to spend the rest of the vacation with Rick and their mutual friend Cynthia in the Hamptons. Charlie, who tells himself that society is out to get the elite, is surprised to hear that other young elites have achieved success in life. Tom learns that Sally is surreptitiously dating Allen, an older record producer; it is implied that Allen promised to make her a star. Realizing that he has developed feelings for Audrey, Tom recruits Charlie to help him rescue her from Rick. The two travel to Southampton, bonding en route. They are surprised to find Audrey in no peril. Tom and Charlie instigate a fight with Rick, who asks them to leave. Audrey is delighted to see that Tom and Charlie have come for her, and leaves with them. Tom and Audrey talk on the beach. Audrey says she is planning to attend college in France, and Tom contemplates visiting her there. Tom, Audrey, and Charlie begin hitchhiking to Manhattan together.

During the summer of 1958, greaser Danny Zuko and straight-laced Australian girl Sandy Olsson fall in love at the beach. As Sandy prepares to return home, she worries that she will never see Danny again, but he comforts her by saying that the summer is "only the beginning" for them. On the first day of his senior year at Rydell High School, Danny reconnects with the members of his greaser gang the T-Birds: Sonny, Putzie, Doody, and his best friend Kenickie. Sandy arrives at Rydell and is introduced to girls' gang The Pink Ladies—Marty, Jan and leader Betty Rizzo—by mutual friend Frenchy. At lunch, Danny and Sandy each separately describe their summer, unaware of the other's presence until Sandy mentions Danny's name, which the Pink Ladies recognize. At a pep rally, Sandy, now a cheerleader, flirts with Tom, a football player. Kenickie arrives in "Greased Lightnin ' ", a heavily used car he plans on restoring in order to drag race it at Thunder Road. Rizzo and the Pink Ladies surprise Sandy by reuniting her with a shocked Danny. Sandy is thrilled, but Danny makes fun of her to maintain his tough image. Frenchy invites her to a sleepover with the other Pink Ladies that night to make her feel better. At the sleepover, Rizzo makes fun of Sandy's good-girl image, and Frenchy announces she is dropping out of Rydell to go to beauty school. The T-Birds crash the party, and Rizzo leaves with Kenickie to have sex in Greased Lightnin' at a nearby make-out spot. While the couple is there, rival greasers Leo and Cha-Cha interrupt them. Danny motivates the T-Birds to work on the car by saying it will win them both girls and races. Later, he sees Sandy on a date with Tom and tries to apologize for his attitude at the pep rally, but she is unconvinced. Danny tries several sports in order to impress Sandy, eventually succeeding at track and field. Sandy, bored with Tom, agrees to be Danny's date to an upcoming dance at which the television show National Bandstand will do a live broadcast from the Rydell gym. Rizzo and Kenickie break up after a fight. After a disastrous beauty class, Frenchy reluctantly decides to return to Rydell to complete her high school education. At the dance, Rizzo and Kenickie bring Leo and Cha-Cha as their respective dates out of spite. In a ribald dance contest that ends with the T-Birds mooning the cameras, Danny begins the contest with Sandy before Sonny pushes Sandy off the floor and Cha-Cha cuts in. Danny and Cha-Cha win as Sandy storms off. To make it up to her, Danny takes Sandy to a drive-in movie and asks her to wear his ring. She accepts, but when he tries to make out with her, she flees the drive-in, leaving Danny hurt. Meanwhile, Rizzo fears that she may be pregnant, and tells Marty. When word reaches Kenickie, he offers to help, but she denies that he is the father. At Thunder Road, Kenickie's head collides with his own car door, leaving him concussed. Danny takes his place behind the wheel and beats Leo in the race. Sandy decides to change her image and asks Frenchy for help. At Rydell's graduation carnival, Rizzo discovers that she is not pregnant, and she and Kenickie get back together. Danny shocks the T-Birds by becoming a letterman, and Sandy shocks everyone with a new leather, "greaser"-style outfit. She and Danny reconcile and the whole gang vows to "always be together". Danny and Sandy drive off into the sky while their friends wave goodbye.

A medical breakthrough in the 1950s has, by the late 1960s, extended human lifespan beyond 100 years. In 1978, the young Kathy H, along with her friends Tommy D and Ruth C, spent their childhood at Hailsham, a traditional boarding school. The teachers, called guardians, encourage students to be health-conscious and create artwork, the best of which is accepted into The Gallery run by the mysterious Madame. They have little contact with the world beyond the school fences. Miss Lucy, a new guardian, tells her class they exist to be organ donors and are destined to die, or complete, early in their adulthoods; she is fired by the headmistress, Miss Emily. Kathy grows attracted to Tommy, but Ruth wins him for herself despite having teased him. Seven years later, Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy, now young adults, are rehoused in the Cottages on a farm. They are allowed to drive on day trips, but remain reclusive, lacking social skills and resigned to their fate. They meet others from similar schools who claim that Hailsham students are privileged, and it is revealed that they are all clones. They discuss rumours of organ donations deferrals that might be granted to clones in love, and the nature of the people they were cloned from, whom they unsuccessfully search for in books and out at the seaside. Tommy, still partnered with Ruth, is convinced that The Gallery serves as verification for deferrals since artwork reveals the soul, and he laments his lack of creativity. Ruth spites a lonely Kathy, claiming that Tommy never thought of her as more than a friend. Kathy leaves, enlisting as a post-operative carer for fellow clones. Nine years on, Kathy has watched many donors gradually die as their organs are harvested. Having not seen Ruth or Tommy since she left the Cottages, she comes across Ruth, frail after two donations. They seek out Tommy to make a nostalgic seaside trip. Ruth reveals that she only seduced Tommy because she was afraid to be alone; she is consumed with guilt and wishes to help Tommy and Kathy seek a deferral. She leaves them with the address of Madame, whom she believes has the power to help them, and later dies on the operating table. Kathy and Tommy enter a relationship, and Tommy explains to Kathy, now his carer, that he has been creating artwork in the hope of earning their deferral. The couple bring it to Madame, but she remains distant, and invites Miss Emily to speak. They reveal that deferrals are indeed a myth, and that the gallery was created to affirm the basic humanity of clones as an appeal for their ethical treatment. Hailsham, now shut down, was the last institution to value young clones as "all but human". Kathy and Tommy leave in silence, but Tommy explodes with grief and anger mid-journey, as he used to as a child. Tommy dies on his fourth donation, leaving Kathy alone as hers begin. Contemplating the ruins of her childhood, she questions in voice-over how different her life has been from that of normal people.

During the Second World War, Eric Lomax is a British officer who is captured by the Japanese in Singapore and sent to a Japanese POW camp, where he is forced to work on the Thai- Burma Railway north of the Malay Peninsula. During his time in the camp as one of the Far East prisoners of war, Lomax is tortured by the Kempeitai (military secret police) for building a radio receiver from spare parts. The torture depicted includes beatings, food deprivation and waterboarding. Apparently, he had fallen under suspicion of being a spy, for supposedly using the British news broadcast receiver as a transmitter of military intelligence. In fact, however, his only intention had been to use the device as a morale booster for himself and his fellow prisoner-slaves. Lomax and his surviving comrades are finally rescued by the British Army. Thirty years later, Lomax is still suffering the psychological trauma of his wartime experiences, though strongly supported by his wife, Patricia, whom he had met on one of his many train excursions, a true railway enthusiast. His best friend and fellow ex-POW Finlay brings him evidence that one of their captors, an interpreter for the Japanese secret police Takashi Nagase, is now working as a tourist guide in the very camp where he interpreted for the Kempetai as they tortured British POWs. Before Lomax can act on this information, Finlay, unable to handle his memories of his experiences, commits suicide by hanging himself from a bridge. Lomax travels alone to Thailand and returns to the scene of his torture to confront Nagase “in an attempt to let go of a lifetime of bitterness and hate”. When he finally confronts his former captor, Lomax first questions him in the same way Nagase and his men had interrogated him years before. The situation builds up to the point where Lomax prepares to smash Nagase's arm, using a club and a clamp designed by the Japanese for that purpose and now used as war exhibits. Out of guilt, Nagase does not resist, but Lomax redirects the blow at the last moment. Lomax threatens to cut Nagase's throat and finally pushes him into a bamboo cage, of the kind in which Lomax and many other POWs had been placed as punishment. Nagase soon reveals that the Japanese (including himself) were brainwashed into thinking the war would be a victorious one for them, and that he never knew about the high casualties caused by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lomax finally frees Nagase, throws his knife into the nearby river and returns to Britain. After receiving a heartfelt letter from Nagase confessing his feelings of guilt, Lomax returns, with Patricia, to Thailand. He meets Nagase once again, and in an emotional scene the two accept each other's apologies and embrace. The epilogue relates that Nagase and Eric remained friends until Nagase's death in 2011 and Eric's one year later.