***SPOILERS*** Losing control of her car on the rain-slick Pennsylvania Turnpike just outside of Pittsburgh Mary Lou Sikes, Ivy Jones, helplessly slides across the grass divider and into the oncoming traffic crashing into a car driven by Silvia Flora Hoover with her five year-old daughter, sitting in the back seat, Audrey Rose. In an instance the car driven by Slivia is knocked over on it's back and bursts into a ball of fire killing both mother and daughter. The time of the accident is 8:20 AM October 3, 1965. Some 375 miles way in New York City two minutes later on 8:22 AM Janice Templeton, Marsha Mason, gives birth to her first child a girl and she and her husband Bill, John Beck, name her Ivy, Susan Swift.
It's now some 12 years later and Ivy has been having nightmares of being burned alive waking up with mysterious blister on her hands. There's also this strange and creepy-looking man who's been following Ivy at school and even to her apartment building doing nothing but just watching her as he knew Ivy all of her life. We and the Templeton's later learn that the man is the president of Unified Steel Corp, among other titles that he has, Elliot Hoover, Anthony Hopkins. Mr Hoover turns out to be the father of Audrey Rose Hoover the girl killed in the October 3, 1965 car crash!
Hoover had been left a broken man after his wife's Silvia and young daughter Audrey Rose's tragic deaths. Over the last seven years Hoover has gotten involved with the occult and the mystic Eastern and Oriental World cultures that believe in Reincarnation and the indestructibility of the soul and that it's as real and alive as both being born and after dying. With the help of a number of oculists and mediums Hoover had tracked down his late daughter's soul, or being, in the body of Ivy Templeton due to the time of her birth and her nightmares about, like Audrey did, being burned alive. Now that Hoover found her he feels that he has to look after Ivy, or Audrey, like some guardian angel.
It's Hoover's annoying behavior and almost fanatical determination to be near Ivy that leads Bill to both verbally and physically have it out with him! This leads Hoover to be brought up on charges of both harassing the Tempeltons and even at one point kidnapping little Ivy. It's Ivy's mom Janice who strangely becomes convinced that Hoover is on to something. Since he has the uncanny ability to get Ivy to stop crying, and in some cases injuring herself, with his father-like attraction to her whenever Ivy goes into one of her uncontrollable fits or spasms.
The very depressing ending of the movie has both Bill and Hoover have, to Janice's objections, Ivy regressed by Dr. Lipscomb, Norman Llyod, back in time. It's then where she returns to her previous life as Audrey Rose Hoover and relives the horror of that accident at the beginning of the movie with first devastating and later deadly results.
I at first had difficulty understanding what exactly Elliot Hoover wanted with Ivy since even if she possessed the soul of his dead daughter Audrey Rose she was still the flesh and blood, and legal, child of Bill and Janice Templeton. As the movie started to slowly explain itself, through Hoover and a number of experts on Reincarnation, it became evident to me that the very fact that Ivy was born so soon, just two minutes after Audrey Rose's death, had left her a both physically and emotionally crippled little girl! It also became evident that Ivy's soul didn't have the much needed rest and time to heal itself from the unbearable trauma that it just went through as Audry Rose.
The tragic ending in the film didn't at all seemed to effect Hoover it was as if he expected it while both Bill and Janice were left numb with shock. It's at the very end of the movie "Audrey Rose" that you begin to realize, like Hoover did all along, that Ivy wasn't meant to be born. In being born so soon, just two minutes after Audry's death, her life would be hell resulting from the terrible memory of her previous incarnations, as Audrey Rose, terrifying death. This would have Ivy either like a moth be attracted to a flame, like she tried to do at a Catholic School snowman bonfire, and end up immolating herself or end up so traumatized that she would never have a happy or normal life.
Janice as well as Hoover, with Bill still not being able to accept what happened, in the end learned that Ivy's death was not a tragedy but in fact an escape from a life of suffering that awaited her. In the near future she'll be reborn again to a loving and caring couple with her troubled and tortured soul healed from what she suffered in the tragic lives that she lead as both Ivy Templeton and Audrey Rose.
