A tense combination of military thriller and melodrama, directed by one of the most formally resourceful genre masters at DEFA, White Blood is a masterful reckoning with moral unease at the dawn of the nuclear age. A young military officer returns to the GDR after having spent some time in the USA and contracting incurable radiation poisoning. But the sole doctor who can help him is an enemy of his family and a staunch opponent of the atom bomb, and so this matter of life or death goes from being an existential struggle to a philosophical one. White Blood is a singularly gripping work and a profound historical snapshot of the international anxiety aroused by nuclear proliferation.