Godsend

Godsend is a 2004 psychological horror thriller film starring Greg Kinnear, Rebecca Romijn, and Robert De Niro, and directed by Nick Hamm from a screenplay by Mark Bomback. It follows a couple (Kinnear and Romijn) who are approached by an enigmatic doctor (De Niro) who offers to clone their deceased son. It received generally negative reviews from critics. Plot Paul and Jessie Duncan are a happily married couple who have an eight-year-old son named Adam. The day after his eighth birthday, when fetching a basketball into the street, Adam is killed in a collision. While leaving a church, Jessie and Paul are confronted by Dr. Richard Wells, an old professor of Jessie's. He offers to clone Adam, an illegal procedure which would require a change of location and identity, to which the Duncans reluctantly agree. Everything appears to be fine with the new Adam until he reaches his eighth birthday. That night, he experiences a violent nightmare. Richard explains to Paul that it is typical for boys his age to have night terrors, and that it is not serious. He explains that because Adam II has reached the age at which the original Adam died, his life cannot be predicted anymore. From that moment on, Adam II continues to have night terrors until they become visions and he starts having them while he is wide awake, losing control of his actions. Adam's visions are recurrent: he witnesses a boy named Zachary walking around in a school building while being laughed at by other children. These images alternate with images of the school burning, and children screaming, and the image of an unidentified woman being attacked and killed with a hammer. Adam's visions affect his daytime personality, making him bitter, delinquent, and uncooperative. Adam begins to bully another boy that goes to his school. One night at dinner, Jessie receives a telephone call from the parent of that child, distressed that her child is missing. Jessie tells Paul, who then asks what Adam was doing that day. Adam says that he was at the river playing. When Paul asks who he was playing with, Adam responds that he is "not supposed to say". The next day, as the Duncans are driving on their way home over a bridge, they are slowed by a police officer. They walk to the side of the bridge to see the woman who had telephoned about her missing child the previous night, screaming at the sight of her son being retrieved by paramedics from a river where he had drowned.