In a remote area of Texas, archaeology professor
Hopper and his dog are looking for a group of hippies that went missing in the 70s. He finds a
van that was abandoned there decades ago with a journal, which has a picture of the owners and
notes with drawings about the local legends. Nearby, he sees a deep hole in the ground that his
dog won’t come close to. There’s also a cave up in the hill, so Hopper goes inside to investigate
while his dog won’t stop barking at it. Using his flashlight,
Hopper sees an armed cowboy standing
perfectly still inside the cave and his curiosity increases. He immediately returns to town and
asks his students Jackie and Taylor to get him a climbing kit ready, but he also announces that
they won’t be coming with him like they originally planned. Moments later, Hopper returns to the same
area and just in case, he ties a rope to a rock and throws it into the hole. Then he goes back
to the cave, which his dog refuses to enter. Once inside, Hopper sees
the same cowboy standing in
exactly the same spot as last time and carefully approaches him. Suddenly he feels something like
an invisible shimmer in the air and touching it reveals moisture, so he thinks it’s like a
transparent wall and crosses it anyway. Two days later, Taylor tells Jackie they should go looking
for their professor, who has been missing since he left. Jackie refuses to go hiking because it’s
dangerous, but she accepts to go if Taylor gets them a vehicle. Taylor has no ch
oice but to call
their classmate Cara, who has a crush on him. Cara brings her dad’s jeep but also her little sister
Veeves and the girl’s best friend Furby, who has a crush on Jackie. The kids will record everything
for a school project and their social media, and they’ve brought cameras for everyone. On their
way to the cave, Taylor explains Hopper has been obsessed with finding a group of hippies that got
lost in the 70s while looking for the Fountain of Youth, which supposedly is hidden
in the area.
When they arrive, the group checks out the van and when they find the pictures, they discover the
missing hippies were actually Hopper’s parents, which explains his obsession. After they take
a group photo, Furby trips over some worn-out rope tied to the ban, so they follow it until
they find another cave entrance. Ignoring the spiders as they go deeper inside, Jackie goes down
through a small tunnel and discovers that the rope has been cut. Taylor takes a closer look at it
a
nd decides it’s not Hopper’s rope because it’s too old. Jackie looks around the tunnel with her
flashlight and notices that the cave is very deep, so they’ll need proper equipment to go looking
for Hopper safely. The group gathers all the exploring equipment from the jeep and since
Furby’s staying because he’s afraid of the dark and creepy crawlers, they leave him a radio
so he can keep watch. Very carefully, the group starts climbing down the tunnel in the cave and
they come across the mys
terious shimmer, which they touch and notice how the air changes. Then
a flashback reveals what happened to Hopper when he crossed the barrier. As he went deeper inside,
the cowboy started to move as well and a strange light began to flicker. Suddenly Hopper heard some
creepy noises and a scream, so he immediately ran away. Once outside, he was shocked to see it was
already night time even though he had been in the cave for just a few minutes. His dog was nowhere
in sight and when he reache
d his truck, he noticed it was covered by overgrown plants and his ID
was worn out. Hopper decided to search the area, which was covered by overgrown plants too, and
found a jeep with a bag indicating this belonged to his students. It seemed the cave had sent
him into the future. Worried about his students, Hopper went back into the cave, leaving a trail
of lights in the process. One of those lights suddenly started floating under the influence
of the transparent barrier, so Hopper kept goi
ng. Back in the present, the group continues to
explore the cave and in another dark tunnel, they hear the same creepy noises Hopper heard before.
The girls are scared of something dangerous living here and decide to leave, ignoring Taylor’s worry
over Hopper. Jackie goes first but as she begins climbing, the rope is suddenly cut off, causing
her to fall. Taylor tries to catch her and fails, so he hurts his arm and Jackie hurts her leg.
Then Taylor tries to check the second rope, but that o
ne has been cut off too. Some of them
think Furby did it as a prank although Veeve says he isn’t the type to do this, but when they try to
contact him through the radio, he doesn’t answer. The group starts to argue over what to do next
only to be interrupted by a loud thud coming from the tunnel. Taylor tries using the radio again
and this time a raspy voice replies ‘help me’ and says his name is Furby. The group isn’t sure
if believing him because the voice doesn’t sound right and an argum
ent ensues which only stops when
they hear another noise coming from the tunnel. Taylor, Veeves, and Cara decide to look for Furby
in the tunnel while Jackie stays behind because of her leg. She tries to follow what they’re filming
with her phone, but soon the signal is lost. After walking for a while, the group reaches a spot
where the sky is visible and they notice the light keeps flickering. Cara climbs on a rock and
finds a broken rope, and when she looks behind it, she finds something
that makes her cry. She begs
Taylor to take Veeves into the other room, but at that moment Jackie arrives crawling and they use
a camera to spy what’s going on: to their horror, it’s Furby’s dead body. Taylor points out that
Furby’s neck is broken and there’s more rope on the ground, meaning Furby had tried to climb
down and someone cut his rope. He also discovers Furby’s camera is still working, so they decide to
watch the whole recording to see what happened. In the video, Furby complaine
d about losing contact
with the group because nobody answered the radio or his yelling, and to their shock, days started
to pass while the boy waited for them outside. His phone ran out of battery, so when he was bored,
he read the journal from the van. The story said a bunch of Conquistadores were sent by the Queen
to find a fountain with magical properties that could heal people or even bring them back to life.
Hopper’s parents went looking for it when Hopper’s sister got sick with cancer
. Days continued to
pass outside and eventually Furby ran out of food and water, so he wanted to leave. He thought
his friends were dead, but he still needed to find them to get the jeep keys. Furby began climbing
down the hole and when he crossed the invisible barrier, he noticed the sky was changing at crazy
speed. Suddenly his rope snapped, and poor Furby fell to his death, explaining the thud the group
heard earlier. Shocked and disturbed, the group stops the video and discusses what th
ey saw. It
seems days passed outside while they’ve only been here for an hour, so something is going and they
need to leave immediately, especially since Taylor thinks that the flickering light is the sun going
through the day-night cycle very fast. Since Cara is the only adult with no injuries, she will be
the one to climb out and get help by using a SOS beacon. As she starts going up, Cara can feel the
air changing, and soon she makes it out only to be shocked by the landscape she finds:
the whole
area has become a creepy barren land. To make matters worse, the rope is gone and Cara can’t
stop coughing because of the weird air. As a huge sandstorm starts approaching in the distance, Cara
tries to use the beacon, but there’s no signal. At that moment, Cara sees a strange triangular object
floating in the sky and decides to go back down. When she reunites with the group, she tells them
what she saw but they don’t believe her because from their point of view, she’s only been a
way
for a few seconds. Cara swears she was out for longer and gives them her camera so they can see
everything she saw. In return Taylor shows her his own video, proving it’s only been a few seconds
for them. The group finally stops being in denial and accepts that time passes faster outside the
cave, which means they’ve been stuck here for weeks. The ropes haven’t been cut off, they wore
off with time and friction, and Taylor’s theory is right: the flickering light is the sun going
throug
h the day quickly. This is the Fountain of Youth because they’re stuck here as youngsters
forever. The group really wants to get out of here so Taylor checks Furby’s body to get his
rope, only to realize something: he hadn’t landed on top of the radio, yet it’s still smashed. They
decide to rewatch Furby’s video again and discover that after the fall, he wasn’t dead yet, only
unconscious. It was he who answered the radio when they called, his voice sounded different because
of the damage on
his neck. Suddenly a mysterious person appeared off-camera and killed Furby.
Now the group is even more desperate to leave, so Cara tries to climb out once more. While the
group waits, Veeves checks Furby’s video again and notices that the sky is changing its color.
This means each flicker isn’t a day, it’s a whole season, and what Cara saw outside was a destroyed
Earth in the far future because they’ve been down here for years. Suddenly something falls through
the hole: it’s some sort of
futuristic ladder. Clara tries climbing it, but she has to go
down when she notices a person in armor coming down. Before they can try to communicate,
someone attacks the person: it’s a caveman, who made the noises they heard earlier and killed
Furby. A fight ensues, but the futuristic guy puts on a special collar on the caveman to subdue him
before turning toward the group as he takes away the stairs. Terrified, the group starts running
away and doesn’t stop until they see some light. They
find a few lit torches and two bodies on
the ground: it’s Hopper’s parents, who have been down here for decades. To make matters worse,
there’s a bunch of cavemen nearby feeding on the dead cowboy, and they hear the group arrive.
Taylor tells the girls to go while he fights the cavemen to buy them time, but although he offers
a fair fight, there are too many of them and they knock him down. The girls hide behind a rock and
see the cavemen run by, so Cara sneaks back and is horrified to dis
cover Taylor is dead. At that
moment the futuristic guy appears and tests a pool of water at the back of the cave. When he gets a
positive result, he drags Taylor into the water, pushing Cara away when she tries to take her
friend back. At that moment a caveman shows up, and the guy quickly knocks him down while Cara
shockingly watches Taylor come back to life, confirming this is the magic fountain from the
stories. Soon the other cavemen also come and by attacking the guy as a group, they
manage to
remove his helmet, which makes it hard for him to breathe. The guy manages to put another collar
on one of the cavemen, and for the third one, Cara hands him back the tool he dropped so he can
win the fight. Those futuristic tools put all the cavemen to sleep. Afterward, Taylor tries to
give him back his helmet so he can breathe, but the guy shows them he’s out of time. At that
moment Veeves and Jackie join them and since the futuristic guy can’t speak their language, he
plays so
me recordings on his computer glove so they can understand what happened: when the
group disappeared, their case was all over the news and their families were pleading for
help. Several thousand years passed since then and Earth became uninhabitable, so humanity left
in a giant spaceship called The Arc which is what Care saw in the sky earlier. After the video is
over, the guy dies. While discussing what to do, Taylor finds something else in the cave: it’s
Hopper’s bag. Determined to find h
im, Taylor tells the girls to bring over Furby’s body while he goes
looking for their professor, bringing the cowboy’s gun just in case. He goes deeper into the cave
and finds the trail of lights Hopper left behind, which he follows until he finds some drawings
on the wall representing the effects of the cave. When he turns around, Taylor discovers
a whole prehistoric family, but only the kid is alive. He ignores them and keeps going until
he finally finds Hopper, who is injured on the floo
r. In front of him there’s the most shocking
thing of all: there is a sphere combining several layers of time and trapping people from different
eras, including cavemen, the Conquistadores, and Hopper’s sister. The professor explains that the
whole cave system exists to protect the Fountain. At that moment the girls start calling for Taylor
so he tries to bring Hopper back with him, but Hopper thinks he won’t survive the trip. He keeps
the gun and tells Taylor to go without him. While the p
rehistoric kid heals his parents with some
water, Taylor reunites with the group and sees Jackie healing her leg in the water. They throw
Furby’s body in the fountain and while they wait, they hear a shot: it’s Hopper, who failed the
only bullet he had. The prehistoric family comes after the group, so Veeves starts a fire
to slow them down. They make it back to the room with the hole and use the guy’s futuristic ladder
to start climbing their way out. Cara reaches the top first only to disc
over that the hole has
been filled with water. When she touches it, a mysterious creature grabs her up and pulls
her through the water. Taylor tries to save her, but at that moment a caveman presses the button
on the ladder and makes it disappear, causing the group to fall as Cara is taken out of the cave
and the creepy hands put a special mask on her face. The group thinks it’s over but in just a
few seconds, strange cables come out of the water and save the friends from falling. The cavem
en
try to jump to grab them, but at that moment, a completely changed Cara shows up and begins
pulling at the cables, dragging the group through the water. After they are gone, more cables
come down to search the caves. Moments later, Furby wakes up and discovers he’s inside The Arc
flying through space. Soon Hopper appears next to him and the group comes to check on them,
showing they’re dressed all futuristic too. On another pool, Hopper’s parents also show up, and
they’re welcomed by hi
s sister who is fully healed now. Now everyone can travel together to Mars with
the rest of humanity to start a new civilization.
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