World on a Wire (Season 1)

World on a Wire (Welt am Draht, 1973) is a German sci-fi TV film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder that you can watch online on iFILM. Set in the near future, a cybernetics institute has built Simulacron — a supercomputer running an entire artificial world populated by nine thousand consciousnesses who believe they are real.

When Dr. Stiller takes over the project after his predecessor dies under unclear circumstances, people with inconvenient knowledge start vanishing without a trace. His investigation leads inward: if he can expose what is wrong with Simulacron, what does it imply about the layer of reality he himself is standing in? Based on Daniel F. Galouye's 1964 novel Simulacron-3, Fassbinder shot it as paranoid noir rather than spectacle — DP Michael Ballhaus kept the frame deliberate and cold.

Made for German public television WDR, the two-part film preceded The Matrix by more than two decades and remains a foundational work in simulated-reality cinema. Starring Klaus Löwitsch. Watch World on a Wire (1973) online on iFILM.