Approaching scientific and industrial facts with a stylized science fiction lens, this formally stunning film examines the design and culture of German nuclear power plants as they near extinction. With clinical calm and glacial detachment, Volker Sattel trains his Cinemascope camera on the minutest details of the immaculate, disturbingly elegant 1970s architecture, landscapes, and technologies of German nuclear energy, which seem at once futuristic and archaic. The artful sound design transforms mechanistic whirs and drones into an ambient elegy for the nuclear era. The cumulative effect is a solemn, Kubrickesque aesthetic of anxiety, wherein the banality and wonder captured in meticulous tracking shots assume a creeping dread in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Almost as troubling is the staff’s tenuous position in relationship to the power and potential doom they ostensibly wield in boardrooms and laboratories. For all the safety processes described, the control of these spaces appears as psychological and artificial as it is actual.  BG