D.O.A. 1988

Dexter Cornell Dennis Quaid is a college professor who has settled into a safe, tenure‑driven routine, and the story opens with him staggering into a police station to recount what feels like his own murder. Over the next hours, he unfolds a tangled past thirty‑six hours, peeling back the layers of a life that once promised much more than tidy routine.

In the weeks before that page‑shredding confession, Daniel Stern as Hal Petersham stands beside him in a circle of colleagues who celebrate Dex’s career while Dex quietly helps Hal with his first book. During the celebration, Dex reveals that he gave an “A” to a manuscript by a gifted student, Nick Lang Robert Knepper, and Hal’s pride curdles into anger when Dex insists he never actually read the piece. The air tightens with unspoken guilt and professional doubt, foreshadowing the dangerous lines between mentorship and exploitation that will soon blur.

Moments later, Nick Lang exits Dex’s world in a way that seems to confirm Dex’s suspicion about Dave’s limits—an apparent suicide that rattles the campus on a bitter, unseasonably hot Christmas season. Dex’s mood sinks into something fouler, compounded by a looming divorce from his estranged wife, Gail Cornell Jane Kaczmarek, whom he suspects of having an affair with Nick. To drown the sour taste of betrayal and bad news, Dex dives into the night, drifting through local bars where he encounters the earnest and curious Sydney Fuller slinking into his orbit.

The next morning brings a grim echo of the night: Gail reveals Dex left his briefcase at her house and confirms the affair with Nick, a bombshell that only deepens Dex’s sense of complicity and panic. A campus medical clinic confirms a harsher truth: Dex has been poisoned, giving him a death clock of twenty‑four to forty‑eight hours. In a haze of fear and frustration, he heads to Gail’s house, where an obscured figure murders her before he can intervene, and Dex collapses from the sedative the clinic prescribed.

Arrested on the roof of suspicion for Gail’s murder and Nick’s, Dex borrows his nerve and escapes, aided by a hand he doesn’t yet understand he’s been given—Sydney. Together they chase a thread that seems to lead nowhere until the trail widens to Nick Lang’s family history and the shadowy figure of the Fitzwaring estate. Nick Lang’s father had been a burglar who clashed with Mr. Fitzwaring, and the Fitzwaring widow, Mrs. Fitzwaring Charlotte Rampling, was funding Nick’s tuition. The couple’s tangled past is complicated further by Cookie Fitzwaring Robin Johnson, the daughter who admits a forbidden love affair with Nick, and Bernard [Christopher Neame], the Fitzwaring chauffeur who keeps dangerous secrets.

Dex’s suspicion of Mrs. Fitzwaring deepens after a volatile confrontation with Cookie and Bernard. A brutal skirmish ends with Cookie and Bernard dead and Dex barely escaping the same tar pits that nearly swallow him whole. The near‑doom moment becomes a catalyst: Dex realizes that living up to his potential means taking risks—romantically and morally—and he finally acts on his attraction to Sydney, leaving a goodbye note and stepping back into life with a new resolve.

The truth behind the carnage refuses to stay buried. Dex confronts the scheming matriarch, Mrs. Fitzwaring and she unveils the full horror: Nick Lang was her son from a previous marriage, hidden from the world to protect the family’s name. The elder Lang’s attempted blackmail backfires when Mr. Fitzwaring threatens to cut her off completely; Mrs. Fitzwaring shoots both men to silence them and protect her children from scandal, while Bernard at once fabricates the burglary story to cover the crime. With both Nick and Cookie dead, Mrs. Fitzwaring’s carefully constructed world collapses, and she takes her own life rather than face exposure.

Back in Dex’s office, a final clue emerges: a green sediment in the mug of Scotch Hal Petersham [Daniel Stern] had given him. The confession comes with shocking candor: Hal plagiarized Nick Lang’s manuscript and killed anyone who might reveal the truth, including Dex’s wife Gail. Dex scuffles with Hal, retrieving a gun from an earlier encounter, and in a tense confrontation he shoots Hal dead, finally breaking the chain of murder and deceit that has haunted him.

With the truth laid bare, Dex finishes his statement and leaves the police station, weathering the storm of revelation and choosing to live with the consequences of his choices. The case resolves not with a courtroom verdict but with a hard‑won sense of renewal: a man who once hid behind safety and ritual now faces life with renewed vigor, and a fragile but hopeful future with Sydney.