-By Frank Lovece

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Oh, those mysterious strangers from beyond a) the grave, b) our galaxy, c) Bed, Bath and. They're always popping up in movies with cryptic warnings delivered through a) innocent children, b) ancient markings, c) surreal visions, or d) whispery voices wafting through the trees of darkened woods. Perhaps they saw some archaeologists poring over relics, and decided that this is the way all important information gets conveyed to mortal Earthlings. You'd think by now they'd Twitter.

Once you accept that trope, however, this “Twilight Zone”-style tale intrigues and engrosses, and audiences will be talking about its three big special-effects set-pieces for quite some time to come—they are truly extraordinary, taking familiar disaster scenarios and freshening them with views, angles and aspects we've seldom if ever witnessed. The penultimate scene pulls no punches, and though the coda may be anticlimactic, the trip is worth the trope.

Using puzzle-solving skills he no doubt developed in another life as National Treasure's Ben Gates, MIT astrophysicist John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), a single father to young Caleb (Chandler Canterbury) and a widower grieving and overprotective after the death of his wife, finds that the numbers on a 50-year-old sheet of paper unearthed from a time capsule contain a code that had predicted decades of disasters: dates, number of fatalities and—as he discovers in one of the most harrowing jet-crash scenes ever filmed, outdoing those of Fearless and Cast Away—even more disturbing data. Caleb, meantime, is being visited by said mysterious strangers from beyond—who apparently monitor our media and enjoyed Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner, Spike in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and Sting in Dune, since they all do the white-spiky-hair, glowering, trench-coat thing.

Koestler tracks down Diana (Rose Byrne), daughter of the grown-and-deceased little girl, Lucinda (Lara Robinson), who'd written the numbers in 1959. Diana, wary over the safety and sanity of her own daughter, Abby (Robinson again), thinks Koestler's a kook. College colleague Phil (Ben Mendelsohn) believes Koestler is simply a burned-out and grief-stricken crackpot. Both change their mind after the second of the final three predicted disasters happens—in yet another spectacularly envisioned, unsentimentally brutal depiction of a human catastrophe.

Director and co-writer Alex Proyas again brings to bear the sort of Gothic or Victorian moderne sense of design and visual foreboding that he established in The Crow (1994) and Dark City (1998). His sense of narrative still defies logic, and his characters are as robotic as anything in his awful I, Robot (2004), but not every “Twilight Zone” boasted a perfectly knotted plot, either. Knowing succeeds through a permeating mood of nihilism that doesn't feel like adolescently existential angst but, instead, that philosophical void in which we each face our own individual deaths and the ennui of God. How many mainstream films so forthrightly dismiss science and religion alike, or, more precisely, show them as that which we cling to as a way to explain our frustrations. Despite the mysterious strangers, it's saying, we are alone.