Nathaniel Pickman Wingate has opened a gateway to another dimension using equations and equipment in his basement laboratory. His wife, Nancy, wants him to get ready for his own birthday party. He wants his son Sam to help him. Sam is up in his room looking at pictures of Jasmine on his computer, and a poster of her arrives which he puts in his closet. Although it is Nathan's birthday, the family is enthralled by a visit from Cousin Desmon, who is now a count in Liechtenstein. While Sam is away getting equipment for his father with his friend Alex, his father gets sucked into the other dimension, and a creature from the parallel universe escapes, pursued by another. The first temporarily traps the second with its spit, attacks Desmon, and becomes a duplicate, absorning his thoughts from the unconscious body. The other manages to get free, and unable to find a human to mimic, finds the poster of Jasmine...

Michael Mikaele is a young man in a catatonic state living in a psychiatric ward where his doctor thinks her sympathies for him justify raping him. It's all part of his mad world, and we see what brought him there. He's an artist from a broken home, working for eight years at a job that he loathes, drawing pictures from sayings on sexually suggestive T-shirts. Mike's unsympathetic boss, Bill, plays bad motivational tapes over the P.A., makes Mike's girlfriend (another employee) handle him during office hours, which is espied by co-worker Joni, and refuses to let Mike have the rest of the day off even though he is clearly ill. He ties together T-shirts out the bathroom window to escape, and befriends a man, Rod, whom, unbeknownst to him, is his girlfriends father. He, however, hallucinates that the cinematographer is walking around the apartment in nothing but a towel...