The Dead Zone

Johnny Smith is a schoolteacher whose life is derailed when a car accident sends him into a coma for five years. When he wakes, the world has moved on without him — his girlfriend Sarah has married someone else and started a family — and he has acquired something he never asked for: the ability to see a person's fate by touching them. Visions arrive unbidden, vivid and certain, and they cost him something each time.

He uses the gift reluctantly — helping the local sheriff identify the Castle Rock Strangler, a case that ends in the killer's suicide — and withdraws from public life, taking work as a private tutor. But the ability will not leave him alone. At a political rally, he shakes the hand of Greg Stillson, a rising populist politician, and is overwhelmed by a vision of Stillson as president initiating a nuclear war. Millions of deaths, in an instant of contact.

Johnny agonizes over what he has seen and what it demands of him. The film is spare and deliberate with this question — not a thriller building toward an action climax, but a character study about moral weight. He attempts to assassinate Stillson at a campaign event, wounding him but missing. Stillson instinctively seizes a baby from the crowd and uses the child as a human shield. As Johnny lies dying from a security agent's gunfire, he grabs Stillson's hand one last time and sees the future has changed — the photograph of Stillson cowering behind an infant will end his career. He dies knowing it worked.