Pabst arrives at the Bavarian film set where Leni Riefenstahl is shooting her Spanish drama, Lowlands. He is surprised to see 30 extras already assembled and waiting, but his mind is mostly on his own film, The Comedians. The film is being edited, the part of the filmmaking process Pabst takes the most pride in, and he resents being pulled away from the project. A camera assistant, Franz Wilzek, offers him a cigarette, and they share a cautiously coded conversation about their work.

For the first scene, Riefenstahl performs a flamenco dance repeatedly with mechanical precision. Pabst thinks of how the scene could be saved through editing and wonders where Riefenstahl found so many young male extras during wartime. He is in charge of directing the extras, instructing them to look “lustful” as they watch Riefenstahl dance. The extras complain of thirst and pain, and Riefenstahl micromanages Pabst’s direction.

Actor Bernhard Minetti, playing the marquis, arrives and mentions that the minister is glad to have Pabst on the set. Pabst knows Minetti is suspected of being a Gestapo informant. During the seduction scene, Riefenstahl continuously asks Pabst for advice, then refuses to act on it. Frustrated, Pabst criticizes Riefenstahl’s stiff performance and suggests she “try acting.” She threatens him with “consequences” and insists on 21 identical takes.

After the shoot, Pabst asks Wilzek why the extras were brought in from Salzburg. Wilzek clarifies that they are from the Maxglan concentration camp. Pabst is horrified by this realization, but Wilzek says nothing can be done. Shaken but resigned, Pabst continues working. Riefenstahl prepares for the next scene, claiming she and Pabst share a patriotic bond for choosing Germany over Hollywood.

Jakob Pabst travels by train with Hitler Youth friends Boris and Felix to visit his father at Dreiturm Castle. Jakob draws in his sketch pad as they intimidate other passengers and discuss Pabst’s films, getting most details wrong.

On the way, Jakob sees a buzzard and recalls a Hitler Youth exercise where he shot a deer, remembering how he dissociated during the killing, forcing himself to become another person who was capable of the act. Like painting, killing “work[s] best when you forget that things are more than just color and shadow” (195).

At the castle, the boys meet actor Werner Krauss, who is at the estate for a meeting regarding Pabst’s new project. Jakob finds his father working on his next film, Paracelsus, with his crew: assistant Franz Wilzek, cameraman Bruno Stephan, screenwriter Kurt Heuser, and ministry official Kuno Krämer. Trude is almost unrecognizable to Jakob, appearing drunk and distant; she strokes the swastika on Jakob’s armband before retreating into her room.

Searching for the caretaker leads Jakob and his friends to the dark cellar. To prove his courage, Jakob descends into the darkness to find Jerzabek. In a hidden room deep under the castle, Jerzabek behaves menacingly, asking if Jakob’s friends are enemies who need “to be dealt with” (202). Jakob assures him they are “good boys” and flees upward, bewildered to find Jerzabek already at the top.

At dinner, everyone but Trude is present. Pabst’s team toasts him, Krauss gives an impassioned speech, and Krämer tells a story about coercing an imprisoned English writer into making propaganda broadcasts. The caretaker’s daughters flirt with Jakob’s friends but ignore him. Gerti, the elder one, slips out with Boris. Partway through dinner, two security men arrive and arrest Heuser. Pabst frets about being able to continue the film without his screenwriter. He asks Krämer to make sure Heuser is released, but the ministry official remains silent. As the table disperses, Pabst tells Jakob not to be frightened, that Heuser’s arrest was “a misunderstanding” that will be cleared up soon. Jakob, however, insists that Heuser must have been arrested for “a reason.” He tells his father he would be “lucky” to sacrifice himself for the Reich, that he is willing to die for the Führer. Pabst leaves without answering his son.

The perspective shifts to Trude in her room. She recalls confronting Pabst after The Comedians’ premiere, telling him his art is “soiled” by Nazi collaboration. He defended himself, claiming he was “trapped,” but also arguing that the war “will pass” but “art remains” (215). She accused him of having no intention of returning to the United States before he fell off the ladder. Pabst responded that an artist must “make art under the circumstances one finds oneself in” (216), and with the excellent resources at his disposal, his circumstances actually weren’t “that bad.” Pabst felt he had won the argument, but Trude was left “rigid with despair” (217).

In the present, Trude hears a “lustful” scuffle outside her door, the commotion of Heuser’s arrest downstairs, and later drinks water containing a fly.

Jakob is lying awake when Boris returns traumatized and crying from his encounter with Gerti. Jakob realizes their friendship will never recover from his witnessing Boris’s vulnerability. The next morning, Boris is gone.

The English writer from Krämer’s story, a prisoner of war forced to make propaganda broadcasts, attends the Salzburg premiere of Pabst’s Paracelsus. At the Festival Hall, Krämer makes him pose for photographs, adding “international flair” to the premiere. Inside, the writer meets Pabst and his wife, who impresses him with her perfect English. Krämer introduces him to Guido Merwetz, a former critic now restricted to neutral film descriptions, as criticism is forbidden.

In the theater, the writer has the “eerie” impression that he has “woken from a terrible dream, to find [him]self back in civilization” (228). He is seated next to novelist Alfred Karrasch, who shouts at him in German, insulting his work. Krämer explains that Karrasch doesn’t believe the writer is truly one of them, even if the rest of the world has been convinced. Confused, the writer realizes for the first time that his work, created “under duress,” has been used for propaganda.

The film begins. The writer is deeply impressed, even though he doesn’t understand the German, especially by a surreal expressionistic sequence depicting the Saint Vitus dance, which culminates in Paracelsus confronting a personified Death.

After the screening, Riefenstahl dismisses the film as bad. Outside, Trude desperately asks the writer how her family can escape the Reich. Krämer and Pabst interrupt, and Pabst firmly leads his wife away. When Trude calls back for an answer, the writer tells her that her husband’s creative freedom should “be a source of great happiness, pride, and consolation” (239).

As they walk back, three men arrest Krämer, leaving the writer alone in Salzburg.

At Dreiturm Castle, Pabst struggles to adapt Alfred Karrasch’s novel The Star Violin. He regrets agreeing to the project and wonders if it might still be possible to escape the country. Finally, a dream about Louise Brooks inspires him to reconceive the film as a dark expressionistic story about unfulfilled longing, now titled The Molander Case. He dictates the new script to Franz Wilzek, and the rest of the team arrives just as they finish. Their cinematographer, Willi Kuhle, looks like a “wraith” after being trapped in a Hamburg bomb shelter. Actor Paul Wegener will star in the film as both the Nazi prosecutor and the sympathetic forger.

Traveling to Prague takes three days, and the crew is caught in bombing rain in Wiener Neustadt. Everyone is safe, but the ordeal sends Kuhle into hysterics. Back on the train the next day, the cinematographer breaks into tears as Pabst describes the camerawork he envisions for the film. Upon arriving in Prague, Pabst receives a telegram that his son Jakob is being sent to the Eastern Front.

At Barrandov Studios, Pabst rebuilds the sets in a distorted expressionistic style. When filming starts, he gives the actors contradictory instructions after each take to manipulate their performance. Willi Kuhle is “barely responsive” as filming progresses, so Pabst and Wilzek operate the cameras themselves.

Running out of time and money for the project, Pabst becomes desperate when military extras for the climactic concert scene are canceled. He insists that losing the concert scene “would ruin the film” (262) and pressures the production manager to find a replacement audience through official channels. Franz doesn’t understand exactly what is happening, but he is filled with a dread he cannot quite place. Leading up to the shoot, he realizes he is trying so hard to deny the reality of where the extras are coming from that he has no thoughts, “only a dull silence” in his head (267).

When the studio fills with emaciated prisoners in costume, Franz is horrified. However, Pabst justifies using them, claiming they are harming no one and that the “diabolical madness” of the situation will allow them to make a “great film.” Franz completes the last, most difficult shot, tracking through the hall and across the audience using a crane. When the shot is completed, Franz recognizes his family’s former pediatrician among the prisoners and collapses.

Pabst and Franz race to edit the film. The front is moving closer to Prague; Pabst knows the war will be over soon and imagines the world celebrating The Molander Case as a masterpiece. In the midst of editing, the novelist Karrasch arrives and demands to see his film. Furious that he wasn’t involved in the making of the movie, Karrasch declares it Bolshevik trash and threatens to send them to a concentration camp. Pabst and Fitz continue working alone in the abandoned studio. They can hear bombing and gunfire outside, but the power stays on, so they work through the night to finish the final cut.

With seven reels of film packed into an army rucksack, Pabst and Franz flee through war-torn Prague carrying the heavy film. Czech partisans corner them on a bridge, but Pabst, in exhausted delirium, seems to mentally edit their reality, and they find themselves on a different street. Helped by Czechs in a cellar, they reach the train station, where a soldier who turns out to be Franz’s childhood friend, Ferdl Graspurek, lets them board the last train to Vienna.

On the train, Pabst sits near a friendly farrier with an identical rucksack. Exhausted, he falls asleep while Franz and the farrier play cards. In Vienna, Pabst discovers that their rucksack was accidentally switched with the farrier’s. The Molander Case is lost. Pabst and Franz stand numbly on the platform, holding a rucksack full of horseshoes.