Wealthy, brilliant, and meticulous Ted Crawford, a structural engineer in Los Angeles, shoots his wife and entraps her lover. He signs a confession; at the arraignment, he asserts his rights to represent himself and asks the court to move immediately to trial. The prosecutor is Willy Beachum, a hotshot who's soon to join a fancy civil-law firm, told by everyone it's an open and shut case. Crawford sees Beachum's weakness, the hairline fracture of his character: Willy's a winner. The engineer sets in motion a clockwork crime with all the objects moving in ways he predicts.

Two women have been murdered within hours of one another near St. Pancras station, but in quite different ways. When a connection is made with two other murders which occurred months before, but also on the same day, DI Thorne realizes two serial killers may be at work in a macabre partnership.

Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is the foremost researcher in the field of Artificial Intelligence, working to create a sentient machine that combines the collective intelligence of everything ever known with the full range of human emotions. His highly controversial experiments have made him famous, but they have also made him the prime target of anti-technology extremists who will do whatever it takes to stop him. However, in their attempt to destroy Will, they inadvertently become the catalyst for him to succeed-to be a participant in his own transcendence. For his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) and best friend Max Waters (Paul Bettany), both fellow researchers, the question is not if they can...but if they should. Their worst fears are realized as Will's thirst for knowledge evolves into a seemingly omnipresent quest for power, to what end is unknown. The only thing that is becoming terrifyingly clear is there may be no way to stop him.

In the funeral of the famous British journalist Joe Strombel, his colleagues and friends recall how obstinate he was while seeking for a scoop. Meanwhile the deceased Joe discloses the identity of the tarot card serial killer of London. He cheats the Reaper and appears to the American student of journalism Sondra Pransky, who is on the stage in the middle of a magic show of the magician Sidney Waterman in London, and tells her that the murderer is the aristocrat Peter Lyman. Sondra drags Sid in her investigation, seeking for evidences that Peter is the killer. However, she falls in love with him and questions if Joe Strombel is right in his scoop.