She is Emma (Jennifer Connelly), and apparently she cheated on him three weeks earlier, causing him to flee and become a killer. Rather, that is what The Strangers and Schreber want him to believe. He is also being sought by a police detective named Frank Bumstead (William Hurt). After fighting with The Strangers on top of a billboard, and seeing several of them die, revealing their true nature in the process, Murdoch is eventually caught by Bumstead, as he seeks to go to his childhood home of Shell Beach — a place that does not exist, but which all the residents of the city have a vague memory of. Murdoch tries to convince him that the city never sees the sun, and shows that Bumstead has no recent memories of daylight.
The Strangers, led by Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien), come to retrieve Murdoch, for they are concerned his powers could rival theirs, as well as ruin their plans for human study. They also, however, believe he could be the key to their understanding. Mr. Hand, who has now been injected by Schreber with the false memories that were supposed to go to Murdoch, is especially keen on capturing Murdoch, as well as with carrying out the murders Murdoch was scheduled to do. Schreber, meanwhile, plans to betray The Strangers and help Murdoch defeat them. He is eventually caught by Murdoch and Bumstead, and leads them to the brick wall at the end of the city that represents Shell Beach. Murdoch and Bumstead break through the wall with sledgehammers and discover they are in a vast floating spaceship designed to look like a city. Bumstead and one of The Strangers end up getting killed and falling into outer space, when The Strangers arrive to confront Murdoch. Murdoch surrenders to Mr. Hand, who holds Emma hostage.
Now caught, Schreber is to imprint Murdoch with the collective consciousness of The Strangers, so that they can experience humanity, but he betrays them, by injecting Murdoch with a lifetime’s worth of training in how to use his tuning abilities to battle The Strangers. In a deft show of narrative control, the syringe with the training memories had earlier been confiscated by Murdoch and put in his coat pocket when he and Bumstead had captured Schreber. Now, as The Strangers shut down their machinery forever, a brief sleight of hand by Schreber has him slip his hand in Murdoch’s coat and use the training memories, not the collective consciousness of The Strangers.
This empowers Murdoch, who breaks free from the grip of The Strangers and starts a final battle with the leader of The Strangers, Mr. Book (Ian Richardson), whom he defeats in Armageddon-like fashion. Murdoch then finds out that Emma has been erased and all the serums Schreber used were also destroyed in the battle. He seeks out Emma, now Anna, after creating a city-encircling ocean (not unlike the World Ocean of yore, when Europeans thought the world a disk bounded by an ocean one could fall off the edge of), and Shell Beach. In a famous scene from the film, one that Jennifer Connelly has become famed for, we see her character, from behind, standing at the end of a long pier. This almost identical shot was repeated in the later films Requiem For A Dream and House Of Sand And Fog. Murdoch then asks her where Shell Beach is and Anna points to it, and then asks him to come with her. The film ends with the two heading there.
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