Film Review: "Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld" ("Cyberbunker: Darknet in Deutschland") (2023).

From Netflix and Germany comes Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld (Cyberbunker: Darknet in Deutschland). This German documentary film directed by Kilian Lieb and Max Rainer. Two worlds collide in an idyllic German tourist town: A group of mysterious Dutchmen and their eccentric leader Xennt want to take over a vast NATO bunker under the town. Xennt promises the village a prosperous future, but doubts spread among the residents. As an underworld manifests itself beneath the streets of the quaint town of Traben-Trarbach, its people puzzle over Xennt's true intentions.

Located in the Netherlands and Germany, Internet service provider, CyberBunker, "hosted services to any website except child pornography and anything related to terrorism", according to its website. The company first operated in a former NATO bunker in Zeeland, and later in another former NATO bunker in Traben-Trarbach, Germany. CyberBunker served as a web host for The Pirate Bay and as one of the many WikiLeaks mirrors. CyberBunker has also been accused of being a host for spammers, botnet command-and-control servers, malware and online scams. The company has also been involved in Border Gateway Protocol hijacks of IP addresses used by Spamhaus and the United States Department of Defense. In March 2013, the Spamhaus hijack was part of an exceptionally large distributed denial of service attack launched against them. Because of the size of this attack it received considerable mainstream media attention. The company is named for its initial location in a former Cold War bunker. As of 2013, CyberBunker listed its address as the bunker, but the location of CyberBunker's servers was unclear. In September 2019, the German police stormed and shut down the company's operations in its bunker in Traben-Trarbach. Seven suspects were arrested.

The film, I had to keep reminding myself, shows us history in the making. I had to keep telling myself what I was seeing was important because most of it is otherwise pretty dull. Lieb and Rainer took on a massive project when they set out to make this film, and they succeed in capturing and unveiling this extraordinary moment in journalism that we, on the outside, never see. As much as it resembles a conspiracy thriller in which data encryption is a survival tactic, the film must be considered, above all, a journalistic achievement. The film is paced like the great paranoid-man political thrillers of the 1970s. Lieb and Rainer make this potentially-tedious exercise seem claustrophobic in the most enthralling way. Movies don't put themselves together. Every moment, every cut, and every camera angle is an editorial choice. So is the structure of the movie, which builds its mix of fear and danger sure-footedly. Vital, urgent, and breathtaking. It is brilliant because it captures an intimate moment of history that will reverberate through the ages; a moment that would not have been captured had not a connection been made. Lieb and Rainer's documentary is proof that you can make an espionage thriller without car chases, bikini babes or martinis. One of its many interesting facets is how unlike the unpredictable doco model it turns out to be while still proving utterly engrossing from start to finish.

Simon says Cyberbunker: The Criminal Underworld (Cyberbunker: Darknet in Deutschland) receives: