Plot
SPOILER ALERT!
Nicole Walker (Reese Witherspoon) is a fairly innocent teenager, living with her overbearing father, Steven (William Petersen) (whom she has a rebellious relationship with), her stepmother, Laura (Amy Brenneman), and her stepbrother, Toby (Christopher Gray). At a rave, she meets David McCall (Mark Wahlberg) and is swept off her feet by his sweet, polite nature. At first Steven seems to like David, but he gradually comes to distrust him, and he gets angry when Nicole violates her curfews to spend more time with David. Eventually Nicole and David have sex. One day, David scares Nicole when he assaults her friend Gary (Todd Caldecott) after he sees them hugging. He also shoves Nicole to the ground when she tries to stop him, giving her a black eye. Nicole ends things with David, leaving him crushed, but her father's now-intense opposition to David paradoxically encourages her to accept David's apologies.
Steven is suspicious about David, so he checks into David's background and finds out that David is not who he appears to be. Steven confronts David on a street corner and orders him to stop seeing Nicole, but David does not desist. One night, Nicole witnesses David forcing her friend Margo (Alyssa Milano) to have sex with him. She misinterprets this as a consensual act and breaks the relationship off again. Nicole ends her friendship with Margo, though Margo pleads for forgiveness. David finds out that Nicole knows about him and Margo. He threatens Margo with violence unless she fixes things with Nicole.
The next day, David trashes Steven's prized car and leaves a taunting note to him. Steven goes to David's house, and after finding out that David has built an obscene shrine for Nicole, trashes his house in a rage. David's obsession with Nicole turns increasingly violent, including his carving her name into his chest, killing Gary in a jealous rage, and eventually breaking into Nicole's house, with the help of his equally violent friends, Logan (Tracy Fraim), Hacker (Gary Riley), Terry (Jason Kristofer), and Knobby (Jed Rees), to get revenge on her family for keeping him and Nicole apart and for trashing his house.
David and his friends first behead the family dog, Kaiser, then kill the family's private security guard, confiscate his cuffs and gun, and force their way into the house. They cuff Steven and Laura and tape their mouths shut. Logan appears and attempts to rape Nicole; Margo intervenes and gets beaten as well. Toby, who escapes through another window, gets to Laura's car and uses the car phone to dial 911, since David's friends cut the phone lines to the house. He also runs over another thug, but not before being barely missed being shot by said thug.
David brings a tied-up and gagged Steven into Nicole's room to "say goodbye" to his daughter, then kills Logan for trying to rape Nicole, because he warned his friends not to harm Nicole. Toby then re-enters the house and manages to get the keys to the handcuffs and frees Laura. David gently tells Nicole, "It has to be this way," and asks her if she wants to go with him. She fakes affection for him and says yes. Meanwhile, Laura frees Steven and Nicole stabs David in the back. Steven then fights with David and eventually throws him out the bedroom window to his death. The family embraces and the final frame shows police and EMT's arriving at the house as the credits roll.
Source: Wikipedia
