Detailed summary of X-Files: I want to Believe

The movie opens six years after the events of X-Files season’s finale. A long row of FBI agents can be seen searching in the snow as they are led by Father Joseph (Joe) Fitzgerald Crissman (Billy Connolly), looking for a missing FBI agent, Monica Banan. Alternately, the abduction of Monica Banan is shown. She is attacked in her home by two men and carried away, though she succeeds in injuring one. The scene shifts again, and father Joe falls on his knees and starts digging the snow. An amputated arm of a man is revealed buried deep in the snow.

Former FBI agent Dr. Dana Scully is shown to be working as the staff physician at a catholic hospital, Our Lady of Sorrows. She is treating Christian, a boy with Sandhoff disease, a terminal brain condition. She is approached by Drummy, an FBI agent to help them in locating Fox Mulder, the former head of the X-Files division, and Scully’s partner, now a fugitive. He promises to call off man hunt if Mulder agrees to help them in investigating the disappearance of a number of young women including an FBI agent Monica Banan. Scully agrees and talks Mulder, who lives in a small house nearby leading life of a recluse, into accepting the case. Mulder is bitter about the unjust treatment meted out to him by the FBI, discrediting his 10 years of service, and considers it a trick to smoke him out. He is bearded and spends his time cutting clips out of newspapers about paranormal occurrences.

Both Dana and Scully are taken to Washington, D.C. Agent Dakota Whitney (Amanda Peet), in charge of the case, wants Mulder’s expertise as she is quite impressed by his work in the cases dealing with paranormal. The investigation is, presently, led by the clues provided by a priest defrocked for pedophilia who claims God is sending him visions of the crimes. The accuracy of his clues makes him a suspect as well. Mulder and Scully go to see him accompanied by Whitney and Drummy. Mulder wants to believe in the visions of Father Joe but Scully is appalled by the man convicted for abusing 37 young boys and disregards his visions completely. Father Joe is convinced that Banan is still alive.

Whitney and Drummy bring Mulder and Father Joe to Banan’s house. Unable to see anything more about Banan, Father Joe falls on his knees in anguish and starts bleeding from his eyes. Others are shocked to see the tears of blood and are not skeptic about his visions anymore. On the other hand, another young woman driving home after a swim in a natatorium is run off the road by Janke Dacyshyn (Callum Keith Rennie). He then walks over to her car, smashes up window of her car and abducts her.

Next morning, Scully and Mulder are in bed together and discussing the case of Christian and his terminal brain disease. She is unhappy over the fact that everyone has given up on him and no one is ready to try the lesser known and experimental cure for Sandhoff disease. They also talk about the vacuum left in their life by the death of their son, William, who would have been Christian’s age if alive. Scully also mentions that the arm found in the snow has traces of drugs and an animal tranquilizer called Acepromazine. Mulder gets excited and intrigued at this piece of news and show renewed enthusiasm and vigor for solving this case. He shaves off his beard and leaves with Scully to meet Whitney. Though it was Scully who had brought Mulder to this case, she now refuses to get involved in the case. She is perturbed by the Mulder’s fascination with the darker side of the human nature. The wrecked car of the second woman is found and Father Joe is pushed into the investigation. He is unable to give them any clues as he sees no visions but Mulder picks up a broken piece of tag near the car door and find a frozen swimsuit in the car boot. They immediately return to the natatorium to investigate. They find out that Banan also frequented that natatorium and both the missing girls had the same AB- blood group. Father Joe keeps saying that second girl and Banan are alive. After an exhausting nighttime search in the snow, led by Father Joe, FBI discovers what later turns out to be frozen burial ground of body parts, buried over many weeks and perhaps months. FBI suspects that the case is connected with illegal organ transplant. Scully is upset with Mulder’s obsession with finding the missing women. She tries to reason with him that his sister is dead no matter what he does. He turns away, ignoring her. Father Joe, unexpectedly, tells her “don’t give up”.

The analysis of the body parts eventually leads FBI to Dacyshyn, an organ transporter in Richmond, Virginia, and his husband, Franz Tomczeszyn- a former victim of sexually abuse by Father Joe. FBI raids the organ donor facility where Dacyshyn works and locates him but he manages to escape leaving behind a box. Drummy opens the box to find Banan’s severed head in it. On the other hand, Mulder and Whitney give Dacyshyn a chase to a building construction site. Dacyshyn pushes Whitney down a shaft and manages to escape again. There is nothing Mulder could do except helplessly watch Whitney fall to her death.

Scully wants to perform a radical and painful experimental stem-cell procedure on Christian. She wants his parents to give her permission as it is his last hope. Father Ybarra, head of the hospital, wants to shift the boy to palliative-care facility for his remaining days. She insists that she is his physician and it’s up to the parents to decide the course of their son’s treatment. Her anguish over the unfairness of the suffering and impending death of a young boy and her faith in God leads her to Father Joe’s apartment. She asks him what he meant when he told her “don’t give up”. He tells her that he does not have the faintest idea. She confronts him about his visions and questions his belief that his prayers are heard. He answers her that his visions and even the desires leading to his committing sins come to him from a power outside him. She judges him harshly for abusing altar boys and says that such sinister desires can never come from God and calls his visions fake. He says that he knows nothing more about visions than he has told FBI and he only wanted to serve God and that led to his castrating himself 26 years ago and collapses into a seizure. Tomczeszyn is also shown suffering a seizure at the same moment. Scully calls an ambulance and Father Joe is shifted to hospital Our Lady of Sorrows. It is later revealed that he suffers from advanced lung cancer. Scully ask him once again if Banan is alive to which he answers in affirmative. Father Joe is then shown a picture of Tomczeszyn and asked if he knows this man. He refuses to recognize him until he is reminded that he is one of the altar boys abused by him. To that he replies in amazement that Tomczeszyn is his link to the girl.

With Mulder’s handling of Father Joe, FBI succeeds in cracking the case. Scully asks Mulder to end his association with this case as she won’t be able to remain with him if he continues exploring “the darkness”. Disregarding her advice, he takes her car and goes off to investigate the matter further as he is sure that girls are still alive. He asks for animal tranquilizers at Nutter’s Feed Store in a small town near the site of abductions but he is told that he needs to have a prescription to have them. Dacyshyn, coincidentally, arrives moments later to purchase animal tranquilizers and Mulder slips out discreetly to follow Dacyshyn’s snowplow. On an isolated road, Dacyshyn catches Mulder unaware and crashes the car and pushes it off an embankment. Dacyshyn soon, has to abandon his snowplow when it stops working. After remaining unconscious for hours, Mulder crawls out of the wreckage of the car and makes his way down the road. He soon reaches a compound where a lot of dogs are barking, another major recurring detail of Father Joe’s visions.

Mulder enters the compound and is attacked by a two headed guard dog. The commotion caused by the dog brings Dacyshyn out of the building where a team of Russian doctors are preparing for whole head transplants in order to place Tomczeszyn’s head on the body of the second abducted woman in a make shift operation theater. His head is attached to Monica Banan’s body. The abducted girl is taken out of the wooden box she was kept, tranquilized and her body immersed in a special liquid. Mulder tries to save the girl by telling the Russians to back off at the gun point. But, a doctor comes from behind and injects him with Acepromazine. Mulder becomes helpless and is carried outside by Dacyshyn to be butchered.

When Scully can not reach Mulder, she contacts Drummy for help. On his refusal, she gets in touch with her old FBI superior, Walter Skinner, for help. They triangulate the phone’s location and manage to find the wreckage of Scully’s car. But there is no sign of Mulder, so they presume that he simply walked away. On their way back, Scully notices a rural mailbox whose address corresponds to a Biblical chapter and verse Father Joe had told Scully. They race to the address and reach just in time to save Mulder from being axed to death by Dacyshyn and break up the medical procedure before the young woman is beheaded.

Later, when Mulder is home, Scully tells him that Father Joe is dead and Mulder points out that Father Joe died precisely at the same moment that Tomczeszyn’s severed head died due to lack of blood flow to the brain. They seem to be linked by something more than just visions. Scully is still bothered by Father Joe’s words “don’t give up”. On Mulder’s gentle prodding to ask herself what he could have meant, she says that she did not give on Mulder and it saved his life. But she has doubts about proceeding with Christian’s surgery. She feels that she is “putting that boy through hell” due to the words of a pedophile priest. Mulder, then, suggests her that if she has any doubt then she should call off the surgery. Scully walks into the surgery with everyone including Father Ybarra and Christian’s parents looking at her. A nurse asks her if she is ready for the surgery and her face gets clouded with doubt. She looks at Christian, smiles and simply says “yes”.