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BY MAGGIE SCOTT
Knowing starts out in conventional horror genre mode, then veers into disaster territory, finally coming to rest in the realm of faith and salvation.

The horror, disaster and spiritual elements of the story register at different levels of effectiveness, compared with its honestly rendered and emotionally absorbing portrait of a father and son.

MIT astronomy professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage) lost his center of gravity with the death of his wife in a hotel fire. He’s got a tight grip of love and concern on his son (Chandler Canterbury), and that keeps him from seeing just how wise-beyond-his-years Caleb is.

Father and son are both struggling with acceptance of reality and coming to terms with their terrible loss. Caleb comforts himself with videos of his mom and the hope of reunion in what he innocently perceives as heaven; while John takes refuge in unresolved grief and anger, skepticism and multiple glasses of scotch.

Students in John’s lectures can expect his lesson to jump from the structure of the universe and the composition of its astral bodies to philosophical questions about determinism, randomness and the meaning and purpose of life.

John appears to subscribe to the randomness theory, but this belief has not brought him any peace of mind. Grief is not the only thing that has played havoc with John; he is in a state of denial about the effect estrangement from his parents, especially his Pentecostal preacher father, has had on him.

John’s wife and his sister, Grace (Nadia Townsend), both urged reconciliation; but John is having none of it. As a man of science, John has closed himself off from his father’s world of prophecy and speaking in tongues.

But, he is about to come into contact with both, when the paper a little girl named Lucinda (Lara Robinson) gave to her teacher to put in her school’s time capsule, fifty years ago, reaches the hands of Caleb, who tells his father, “Maybe it means something.” The “it” is a page full of numbers.

With growing terror, John deciphers their significance: the time and place of fatal disasters and the number of victims. Not only do the numbers record the past, they designate catastrophes of the future.

Meanwhile, since coming into possession of Lucinda’s paper, Caleb’s head is being assaulted at random moments by a cacophony of indistinguishable voices; and he has become the object of intense and supposedly menacing attention from several mysterious men.

Frightened for his son, determined to prevent catastrophic loss of life, John attempts to alter the course of one of the predictions. But eventually realizes that these catastrophes are only the prelude to a global cataclysm in which he, Caleb and Lucinda’s daughter (Rose Byrne) and granddaughter (Robinson) will play a devastating role.

Director Alex Proyas and his trio of writers get gold stars for combining entertainment with ideas; as they spook, thrill, amaze, sadden and inspire making a case for science as religion’s tool of revelation.

Rated PG-13 for profanity and disaster scenes.

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