Red Pill

A writer arrives in Wannsee, a leafy suburb of Berlin, on a prestigious fellowship in Germany. He has a book he is supposed to be writing, but he cannot get any work done. Instead he wanders the lakeside and loses himself in Blue Lives, a brutal police drama whose bleak, survival-of-the-fittest outlook grows strangely hypnotic. Doubt creeps in about whether his own writing is worth anything.

Wannsee is crowded with the past. From across the water he can make out the villa where the Nazis organised the Final Solution, and on his walks he passes the grave of the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist, who took his own life, convinced that happiness was impossible in this world.

A night out with friends brings him face to face with Anton, the man behind Blue Lives. The narrator becomes convinced that the two of them are locked in a hidden cosmic struggle, and that Anton is using the show to draw viewers toward a hateful, alt-right-leaning worldview. As his certainty deepens, he has to ask whether the trouble lies in the world or in his own mind.