A bleak container in the middle of nowhere in the Nevada desert. Inside: the drone pilot, tightly framed, finger on the button, staring at screens, instructions via headset. Selecting target, countdown, fire – and thousands of miles away a terrorist camp gets blasted to bits. Or a school, accidentally, after which pilot Ivan (Grégoire Colin) goes into an existential crisis. Nightclub, sex, love; remorse and denial; vague, coarse-grained drone images – Ivan enters the disorienting border zone of his mental capacities, where his subconscious is respectively portrayed as an unreachable island and as a boxing school where he has to free himself of his deepest fears as he looks for genuine contact. David Verbeek (known for Asian-oriented films such as Shangai Trance, 2008) once again analyses the psychological effects of fast cultural and technological developments, this time supported by a minimalist soundtrack by Tindersticks keyboardist David Boulter.
