| Director | M. Night Shyamalan |
|---|---|
| Genre | action film, drama film, horror film, mystery film, psychological drama film, psychological thriller film, science fiction action film, science fiction film, science fiction horror film, superhero film, suspense film, thriller film |
| Runtime | 128 min |
| Country | United States |
| Budget | $20 million |
| Box office | $247 million |
Superhuman David Dunn, now a superhero dubbed the Overseer, and his son Joseph track Kevin Wendell Crumb, a man with multiple personalities called The Horde, to an abandoned factory near Philadelphia. Kevin holds four cheerleaders hostage to feed The Beast, a superhuman personality that several of Kevin's personalities worship. David rescues the cheerleaders and has a scuffle with The Beast until they are both captured by Dr. Ellie Staple. They are taken to the Raven Hill Memorial Psychiatric Hospital, where a sedated Elijah "Mr. Glass" Price, a former terrorist born with osteogenesis imperfecta, whom David previously fought over a decade ago, is being detained.
David and Kevin are placed in separate rooms containing unique security measures based on their weaknesses of water and light flashes, respectively. Ellie diagnoses them as suffering from delusions of grandeur and believes they do not have superpowers. Elijah's mother Mrs. Price, Joseph, and Beast survivor Casey Cooke individually fail to convince Ellie that superhumans are real and to let them go. As part of her final evaluation, Ellie brings the trio to a room where she challenges them with explanations backing up her theory. David and several of Kevin's personalities become confused and distraught, while Elijah remains catatonic.
That night, Elijah awakens, escapes from his room, and conducts research on David and Kevin. He visits Kevin and says he has been feigning his sedated state and plans to escape the institute, but he requires the help of The Beast to do so. The next morning, Ellie sees surveillance footage of Elijah outside his room and performs a prefrontal lobotomy-type procedure on him. When he is alone with his caretaker, Elijah kills the man, revealing the procedure was unsuccessful because he had sabotaged the surgical laser. He frees Kevin and then manipulates David into using his strength to break out of his room by relaying a master plan for The Beast to reveal himself to the world at the opening of the Osaka Tower, a new skyscraper in Philadelphia, while Elijah destroys a chemical lab in the building, potentially killing thousands.
Mrs. Price, Casey, and Joseph arrive at Raven Hill just as Elijah, Kevin, and David escape. Ellie, also witnessing the fight, calls an armed SWAT team to move in on the superhumans. David and The Beast battle at the Raven Hill parking lot, before Elijah tells The Beast that David's weakness is water, at which point Joseph reveals that Kevin's father died in the train wreck that Elijah caused. The Beast thanks Elijah for contributing to his creation by making it so that Kevin was raised solely by his abusive mother, before mortally wounding Elijah for manipulating the situation that led to Kevin's abuse. He throws David into a water storage tank, but David is able to break through the side, drenching the surrounding area. Casey manages to bring out Kevin's dormant original personality, at which point a sniper fatally shoots him, and Kevin dies in Casey's arms. While SWAT officers drown David in a flooded pothole, Ellie reveals she is part of a clandestine organization that has been suppressing the existence of superhumans for millennia by tracking and killing them.
In the aftermath, Ellie deletes the surveillance footage of the confrontation and makes plans to move on to investigate the next case of suspected superhumans. However, when she overhears a group of comic book readers discussing the tropes of a super-genius mastermind, she realizes Elijah must have had a secret plan and discovers he arranged for the Raven Hill surveillance footage of the fight to be live-streamed to a private website, leaving her and her organization defeated. Mrs. Price, Joseph, and Casey each receive a copy of the footage and release it to the public, exposing the existence of superhumans.