“You're a closed circuit, baby,” chants American avant-garde musician Laurie Anderson, who appears as a Greek chorus throughout this low-key thriller by West German director Rudolf Thome (Detective, Berlin Chamissoplatz, etc.). Bruno Ganz is well cast as a reticent electronics expert, Faber, whose best friend (and off-hours chess partner) is his computer. Faber's asocial existence fosters a kind of amorality that allows him to play with dangerous, improbable ideas as if they were realities. At a party, he meets Melo (Hanns Zischler), a slippery figure who trades on the edges of the art and drug worlds, and his girlfriend Juliet (Dominique Laffin), a dispirited actress ready to take on a new role in life. Together the three new friends devise a plan whereby Faber, the brains of the operation, will break into the computer system of a European banking corporation and siphon funds electronically into a Swiss bank account. A foolproof system, they figure; a “system without shadows.” But what develops is an old-fashioned, Riffifi-like bank heist; one murder, a blackmail scheme, and a romantic triangle later, Faber's life resembles Laurie Anderson's “closed circuit” more than any shadowless system. Thome plays off of, rather than recreates, a traditional thriller, and cinematographer Martin Schaefer, former camera assistant to Robby Müller, similarly sheds new light--an intense, almost supernatural light--on the film noir. Closed Circuit, Thome's ninth film, was featured at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival.