First conceived for West German television as a two-part miniseries by the extraordinarily prolific filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder, World on a Wire leans into the paranoia inherent to a divided country in the rapidly evolving 1970s. Based on Daniel F. Galouye’s American science fiction novel Simulacron-3 (1964), Fassbinder’s tongue-in-cheek adaptation addresses the ethical concerns of simulated reality and the dangers of unchecked technological sentience. A delightfully labyrinthine tale that predates our current fascination with artificial intelligence and machine learning, World on a Wire brings into focus the blurry line between good and evil.