The Jacket

The film centers on a wounded Gulf war veteran who returns to his native Vermont suffering from bouts of amnesia. He is hitching and gets picked up by a stranger, things go pear shaped when a cop pulls them over and is murdered by the stranger. The vet. is wrongly accused of killing the cop and lands up in an asylum. A quack doctor prescribes a course of experimental therapy, restraining him in a heavy duty straight jacket-like device, and locks him away in a body drawer of the basement morgue. During course of his treatment he gets flashbacks and visions of his future , where he can foresee he is to die in four days time. The catch is he doesn't know how. Thus commences the classic race against time.

In 1991, in Iraq, the military Jack Starks is shot in the head and presumed dead. When he blinks his eyes in the morgue, the doctor is called. One year later, after being discharged from the army, while hitchhiking in a road in Vermont having amnesia problem, he helps a drunken woman, Jean Price, and her daughter, Jackie Price, fixing their car. Later, he gets a lift, but the driver is stopped by the police and kills the policeman with three shots. Jack is also shot in the head and incriminated by the real killer, who leaves his gun close to the fainted Jack. He goes to court and is sentenced to the mental institution Alpine Grove for insane criminals. Jack becomes the experiment of Dr. Thomas Becker, who drugs and dresses him with a jacket and lock him in a drawer for corpses in the morgue. While locked, Jack travels to 2007, where he meets a grown-up Jackie Price and they fall in love for each other. Jack envisions that the only exit from the institution is though the jacket.