Elderly Franz Wilzek appears on live television and shouts that The Molander Case was never filmed when asked about the lost film.

Studio executives ignore Pabst's film pitch and pressure him into directing a melodrama called A Modern Hero, which he despises.

Nazi agent Kuno Krämer approaches Pabst at a Hollywood party, offering unlimited resources if he returns to Germany to make films.

Louise Brooks rejects Pabst's film pitch, telling him his Hollywood career is finished after the failure of A Modern Hero.

Defeated by his Hollywood failures, Pabst sails back to Europe with his wife, Trude, and their young son, Jakob.

German-speaking emigrants in Paris warn Pabst that voluntarily entering Nazi-annexed Austria is suicidal, but he dismisses their concerns.

Jerzabek enters the library, deliberately unlocks the wheels of Pabst's ladder, and shakes it, sending Pabst crashing to the floor.

Trude tells the injured, delirious Pabst that Germany has invaded Poland, the war has begun, and they are trapped.

In a surreal Berlin meeting, Goebbels coerces Pabst into declaring his penance and accepting the script for The Comedians.

Pabst is horrified to learn the extras on Riefenstahl's Lowlands set are Sinti and Roma prisoners from a concentration camp.

Desperate to complete The Molander Case, Pabst pressures his production manager to procure concentration camp prisoners as the concert hall audience.

Pabst and Wilzek finish editing The Molander Case as bombing and gunfire from the Prague Uprising erupt outside the studio.

Pabst and Wilzek flee through war-torn Prague streets carrying the seven reels of the finished film in an army rucksack.

Pabst awakens in Vienna to discover his rucksack was accidentally switched with a farrier's, leaving him with horseshoes instead of his film.

Rummaging in his closet at the sanatorium, Wilzek finds the old army rucksack containing the seven reels of The Molander Case.

G. W. Pabst's career collapses in Hollywood after he is forced to make a film he despises and is rejected by both Greta Garbo and Louise Brooks. A Nazi agent's offer and the family's decision to visit Austria lead them into a trap sealed when Jerzabek injures Pabst on the very day the war begins. Forced into collaboration with the Nazi regime, Pabst accepts a script from Goebbels and discovers the human cost of the system he has entered on Riefenstahl's film set. His ambition culminates in the morally compromised production of The Molander Case, for which he procures concentration camp prisoners as extras. The finished film is lost when rucksacks are accidentally swapped on a train, stripping Pabst of any justification for his sacrifices. Decades later, the truth about the film's fate remains hidden in a sanatorium closet, as Wilzek's long-kept secret is finally revealed.

The headline events of Pabst's moral and creative downfall.

After the broadcast disaster, Rosenzweig tells Wilzek that his father was one of the extras in The Molander Case.

Pabst visits Greta Garbo at her Hollywood home to pitch his film, but she declines and suggests he ask Louise Brooks instead.

Two telegrams arrive on the ocean liner: one cancels Pabst's French film project and the other is from his ailing mother in Austria.

The narrator reveals the divergent fates of the Paris emigrants, including escapes, death by suicide, internment, and death in a gas chamber.

At the Reich border, Jakob watches armed officials force families and crying individuals off a train attempting to leave the country.

The Pabsts arrive at Dreiturm Castle to discover that Jerzabek has been tormenting Pabst's confused and elderly mother, Erika.

To secure social standing at his new school, Jakob strategically provokes a fight with a larger classmate and wins using a hidden stone.

Kuno Krämer arrives at Dreiturm Castle and formally summons Pabst to meet the propaganda minister in Berlin.

In Berlin, actor Rühmann tells Pabst he arranged a sham divorce from his Jewish wife to keep working under the Nazi regime.

Trude attends a literary circle for Nazi officials' wives and forces herself to praise a novel she found worthless in order to gain acceptance.

Gestapo agents arrive at a dinner at Dreiturm and arrest screenwriter Kurt Heuser in front of Pabst and his assembled film crew.

An English prisoner-of-war is showcased at the Salzburg premiere of Pabst's Paracelsus as a symbol of supposed international endorsement.

Pabst struggles to adapt Karrasch's approved novel until a dream about Louise Brooks inspires him to reimagine it as The Molander Case.

After the war, Trude takes control of Pabst's career, writing scripts and directing actors while a broken Pabst stares silently into space.

A middle-aged Jakob, scarred from a wartime tank explosion, visits Louise Brooks in Rochester; she kisses him on the mouth and he flees.

While Pabst pursues his doomed ambitions, the people around him reveal the full texture of life under fascism and in exile. From Garbo's gentle refusal and the revealed fates of the Paris emigrants—some surviving, others dying in camps—these events show the stakes that Pabst repeatedly ignores. Back in the Reich, the family's confinement deepens as Jakob learns to fight dirty for social survival, Trude performs compliance at a book club, and the arrest of screenwriter Heuser exposes the regime's reach into every corner of daily life. The premiere of Paracelsus brings an English prisoner-of-war into the spotlight as unwilling proof of international endorsement, while Krämer's own sudden arrest shows that no one in the system is truly safe. Pabst's creative transformation of Karrasch's approved novel into The Molander Case drives the story's final act of collaboration. In the postwar wreckage, Trude holds the pieces of her husband's career together while a scarred Jakob carries his father's choices as permanent physical wounds.

The supporting scenes and secondary characters that shape Pabst's world.

An elderly and disoriented Franz Wilzek is collected from a sanatorium and driven to a television studio for a live broadcast appearance.

After Wilzek's on-air outburst ruins the live program, Heinz Conrads fires the young editor Rosenzweig on the spot.

Pabst's Hollywood film A Modern Hero is a commercial failure, destroying his standing with the studio executives who funded it.

The Pabsts discover that Jerzabek intercepted their mail and forged the urgent telegram about Erika's illness to lure them back to Austria.

Jerzabek's daughters tie young Jakob to an attic post wielding a knife and ax, prompting Pabst to resolve to leave the castle next morning.

The Pabst family is forced out of the main castle and confined to cramped caretaker's quarters while the Jerzabeks occupy the upper floors.

In the sanatorium, Professor Stelzner warns Erika Pabst that their confused mental state is the only thing keeping them safe from the authorities.

On Riefenstahl's Lowlands set, Pabst first meets young camera assistant Franz Wilzek, and they share a cautious coded conversation about their work.

During a summer visit to Dreiturm, Jakob and his Hitler Youth friends discover Jerzabek behaving menacingly in a hidden room deep beneath the castle.

Jakob devastates his father by declaring at the dinner table that he would be lucky to sacrifice himself for the Führer and the Reich.

Moments after the Salzburg premiere of Paracelsus, three men arrest Kuno Krämer and lead him away, leaving the English writer alone in the street.

Franz Wilzek collapses on the Barrandov studio set after recognizing his family's former physician, Dr. Sämann, among the prisoner-extras in costume.

Trude's flashlight dies deep in a real cave after filming wraps, and she tells Pabst in total darkness that she stopped loving him long ago.

A final flashback reveals the farrier tracked down Wilzek and returned the film shortly after the train, but Wilzek chose never to tell Pabst.

Wilzek falls asleep in the sanatorium with the found film reels nearby, his memory already fading, thinking only of Dr. Sämann's face.

These events trace the turning points that reveal character and shift the story's moral direction, beginning with Wilzek's confused arrival at the television studio and the broadcast that unravels his careful self-deception. Pabst's Hollywood failure and the Jerzabek trap set the conditions for his capitulation, while quieter moments—Stelzner's warning in the sanatorium and Wilzek and Pabst's first meeting on a wartime set—show how ordinary people navigate extraordinary danger. Jakob's discovery of Jerzabek's hidden menace and his own fanatical declaration that he would die for the Führer mark the point at which Pabst's compromises become irreversible for his entire family. The story's final revelations—Wilzek's collapse in the concert hall, Trude's confession in total cave darkness, and the truth about the returned rucksack—expose the full human cost of a lifetime of quiet choices. Together, these turning points show that complicity is built from a series of small decisions, each one narrowing the path back to integrity.