A Good Show

A Case Study of Nuclear Boy (2026)

Written by Joshua Allen
Founder and Executive Director, The Atlantis Awards

“An audience can fill a room without making it any less lonely. The film adds bodies early, then tests what their presence is worth.”

The Atlantis Awards Case Studies are not reviews. They examine the specific filmmaking mechanisms that make a work function, how those mechanisms are constructed across departments, and what another filmmaker might learn from them. This study follows the construction of the finished film, with production history and filmmaker commentary alongside the analysis.

Content notice and spoiler warning: This study discusses self-endangerment, homemade explosives, theft, radiation exposure and illness, verbal abuse including a homophobic slur, an online relationship shaped by mistaken assumptions about identity, and the film’s complete plot, including its ending.

There is a difference between wanting people to watch you and wanting someone to be there. For Aike, the teenage chemistry enthusiast at the center of Nuclear Boy, that distinction is difficult to recognize. Attention arrives when something explodes. Approval follows when he puts himself at risk. People who otherwise have little interest in his company become enthusiastic when he gives them something to see. It is understandable that he mistakes the enthusiasm for affection. It is also dangerous.

Directed by Joren Molter and written by Britt Snel, the film follows Aike’s attempt to build a nuclear reactor in his mother’s backyard workshop. The premise draws on the story of the American teenager David Hahn, but this is not a biographical reconstruction. Molter and Snel use that extraordinary undertaking to explore a more ordinary desire: to become someone other people might choose to spend time with.

What makes that desire interesting on screen is how the film gives it physical form. Online viewers occupy Aike’s rooms. A girl appears beside his bed without entering through a door. Real people can stand close enough to touch him while remaining emotionally unavailable, and imagined company can be arranged around him with the reassuring solidity of a group photograph. Cinematographer Roy van Egmond’s compositions repeatedly ask us to consider the relationship between the people in the frame, not merely whether they share it.

The means are disciplined. Most scenes play in a single take. The camera moves sparingly, and it usually holds Aike at a distance: low in the frame, at its edges, behind bars, glass and other people’s bodies. Alternating singles often sharpen moments of separation. Rutger Reinders’s score is deliberately out of tune for nearly the whole film. Each of these choices returns, in some form, to the same question.

The film does not solve loneliness by gradually adding bodies to an empty picture. It adds bodies early, then tests what their presence is worth.

Waiting for the Bang

The opening establishes the terms of Aike’s relationship with his audience before explaining who that audience is. It begins on an empty garden: a scorched fence, a chair, some canisters. The title cards (“This is a true story” / “Except for the parts we made up”) are laid over the live shot rather than black. Then Aike arrives, arranges a webcam, and introduces an experiment involving a garden gnome. The camera observing him remains fixed. Preparation, anticipation, apparent failure and the eventual explosion occupy the same patiently held space for well over two minutes.

The delay is essential. The fuse fizzles, and the music stops. What had been a demonstration becomes an awkward stretch of uncertainty. Aike approaches to investigate, the gnome explodes, and he is thrown backward. Then he gets up and whoops. The music resumes, and applause follows.

Several responses are packed into that progression. The failed ignition is embarrassing. His approach is worrying. The explosion is startling and funny. His excitement gives us permission to enjoy the result, while the applause supplies an apparently external judgment: that was good. Nobody needs to tell him this is how he earns attention. The timing has already made the connection.

The sequence also separates an apparently uninterrupted event from the method that creates it. Molter told AperiTIFF that Blanken’s performance and the practical explosion were filmed separately, with the actor returning from make-up to continue the action; someone on set supplied the smoke with e-cigarette vapor. The pieces were assembled to preserve the continuous presentation. The film would rather hide a join than announce it with a cut, and that preference governs much of what follows: the cut is a resource it spends carefully.

It spends the first one on the watchers. When the audience is revealed, its arrangement is peculiar. These people do not behave like neighbors who have wandered over to investigate. Their stillness and selective audibility make them more like spectators waiting for their cue. The applause is emphatically present, but the incidental sounds that would normally accompany a gathering (shifting bodies, murmuring, little interruptions) are largely absent.

That discrepancy lets the film introduce an impossible social arrangement without announcing a separate fantasy register. We see people, but their behavior does not quite belong to the physical world around them. Aike accepts the arrangement, and for the moment the film lets us accept it with him.

Scouting provides a less accommodating audience. During Bulldog he stands apart from the group, barely participating in the first runs before he is knocked down. The wide framing makes the distance legible before anyone explains it. He occupies the same field and belongs to the same organization, but the distribution of bodies tells a different story about membership.

The bicycle passage extends the exclusion without another confrontation. The scouts ride past; Aike offers an awkward smile and follows alone, and a sour piano phrase starts up behind him. It is the first of many cues that accompany him while he travels toward people. There is no speech about rejection. The group’s movement is sufficient. They have somewhere to go together, and he travels behind them. At home he calls “I’m home” through textured door glass, and nobody answers.

Guus Blanken’s performance keeps these moments from becoming illustrations of a generic awkward teenager. His attempts to connect stay small enough that the people around him can miss their failure. A tentative smile never turns into a broad grimace for our benefit. Blanken described the challenge as keeping Aike’s social discomfort restrained enough to avoid caricature; the loneliness itself was already in the situations.

In these early passages, the camera does not press in to rescue the discomfort. It frames him low, with empty space above him, and lets other bodies and horizontal edges cut across him. On first viewing that distance can feel almost unkind, as if the camera were pushing him away just as the people around him do. It turns out to be the design.

The opening’s progression, from applause, to exclusion, to solitary travel, to an unanswered arrival home, states the problem economically. An audience responds instantly to the dangerous thing he does. Ordinary companionship proves harder to secure.

Company Without an Entrance

Mirna, Aike’s mother, is not indifferent to him. That qualification matters, because the early domestic scenes would be far less interesting if she were simply another adult failing to care.

When she asks whether anything good happened at scouts, he tells her he was chosen for Bulldog. Her response treats this as evidence of inclusion. We have seen what the experience looked like, so the reassurance carries a small, painful mismatch. It is the first of many reports Aike gives adults that the film has already contradicted. She hears something positive in an answer that does not communicate the event.

Aike rests his head against her. The affection is real even though the understanding is incomplete. Jelka van Houten does not need to play the mother as secretly neglectful or foolish for the exchange to work. Mirna is trying to reach him with the information he gives her. He is close enough to be held and still unable to say what is wrong.

Miki’s first appearance offers another kind of closeness. Mirna is treating his burns from the last experiment; Aike walks to his laptop, which turns a wide into a close-up without a cut. As Mirna moves across the room, she briefly obscures the bed; when the sightline clears, a girl is present where no entrance has been shown. The appearance is achieved through blocking and withheld space rather than a visual effect announcing that we have entered Aike’s imagination. Her exit, a minute and a half later, is the same trick in reverse: “my mum is calling,” and she is gone without a door.

The difference is consequential. Miki does not arrive as an image on a screen that the film then translates into a fantasy. She is simply available to him in the room. Kiara Sastroredjo’s tentative manner makes the interaction feel less like a perfected romantic dream than a conversation between two people who do not quite know how to speak to each other (“Nothing.” “You?” “Nothing.” “Cool.” “Cool.”). She looks at him; he looks at his hands. The hesitations belong to the same emotional world as Aike’s own.

Molter has described placing the online characters physically in scenes as an alternative to repeatedly photographing phones, laptops and message bubbles. The film keeps a precise version of that rule. Screens are allowed to carry information, such as a search page or a product listing, but never people. Everyone online is a body.

The choice turns communication into staging, and it creates a productive uncertainty. A person occupying space in Aike’s scene is not necessarily occupying space in his house. The camera gives us access to his experience without becoming his literal eyesight. The film generally avoids adopting Aike’s literal visual perspective, even while presenting his subjective social world.

Camp shows what the real group offers instead. In a long take framed through the A-frame poles of a lashing exercise, Aike is sent off for “the blue tape,” offers to blow something up, offers to show his followers. A scout says, “Let his ugly white mug look for it with his dumb babbling.” He looks back. Then the film does something it rarely does. It cuts quickly: a meadow, reeds, Aike lying alone in the grass seen from above. The unusually quick cutting comes immediately after an extended passage of exclusion.

The tanning experiment develops the audience relationship established by the gnome. A brief succession of setups opens the broadcast: Aike, the crowd standing in his doorway, Aike again. Then the experiment plays out in a single sustained take of more than a minute, with the crowd in frame. He presents his homemade preparation, cautious at first (“test it on my arm first”), while they look at their phones. He becomes more cavalier (“Fuck testing, right?”), and their heads lift. He puts his own face into the mixture, and applause rewards the escalation. A desk fire starts. His mother’s off-screen call belongs to a different system of attention: not the pleasure of seeing what he will do, but the ordinary demands of someone who lives with him. The audience keeps applauding.

Aike does not begin as a passive victim of an audience issuing commands. He likes the experiments, likes demonstrating his knowledge, and likes the response. The problem is the interpretation he gives that response. Enthusiasm for the spectacle starts to stand in for enthusiasm for him. Once those become interchangeable, putting more of himself into the experiment seems a reasonable way to obtain more affection.

The long takes give that exchange room to develop without reducing it to provocation, reaction and punishment. Molter rehearsed with Blanken one day a week from December to June, filmed the rehearsals, and assembled them into a preliminary version of the whole film. He also shot shorter and dialogue-free versions of scenes, preserving editorial choices within his preference for sustained shots.

That preparation matters on a production that, according to figures Family Affair Films supplied to Broadcast Magazine, shot in nineteen days on a budget of about €874,000. The method puts much of the work into performance timing and blocking rather than trusting conventional coverage to supply the rhythm later. Actors walk into their own close-ups; a frame empties and fills without a cut. What looks unhurried on screen is not an absence of construction. The hesitation, the pause before a response, and the moment an interaction stops being reciprocal are among the things being constructed. Speaking to Filmkrant, Molter described the single take as, for him, the most honest way to tell a scene.

The Demonstration

Aike’s father arrives first as a recording. A long living-room take opens on his voicemail greeting, “Hayo Meijema. Leave a message,” and Aike fills it with invention: it was awesome, friends are waiting outside. He walks out of frame; the camera stays on an empty table. Then a phone rings off-screen and pulls him back, and his father suggests he drop by the power plant sometime. “When would that be?” No date. “Yes,” Aike says, with the biggest smile he has managed so far. An unseen voice calling him back into a frame he has left becomes a recurring figure.

The visit gives the film its clearest example of physical access failing to become emotional access. A barrier opens, and Aike is admitted into Hayo’s professional world. The film first makes him wait, holding on him against a crash barrier rather than skipping the delay. Then father and son share a single wide frame on the paving for about half a minute. They almost hug, and retreat from the gesture.

The aborted movement is more revealing than any declaration of distance. Both bodies briefly approach affection, and neither completes it. Only then does the film cut, into separated singles that preserve the divide rather than repairing it with a reassuring shared composition. The coverage is lopsided: Aike’s face takes most of the screen time, so the father’s best lines (“I want to see you blow them away,” “Soon no one will be able to ignore you”) land on the son receiving them. When the wide returns, Aike stands alone inside the gate he waited outside, and his father is visible only through the building’s glass doors, already walking away. The cut arrives exactly where the embrace fails.

Hayo’s work also gives Aike’s scientific interests a second audience. His experiments are not only a way to entertain strangers online. Scientific achievement offers a language in which he might become interesting to his father. The reactor project belongs to that relationship as well as to the demands of his followers.

Next door, a younger boy named Danny watches over the fence. Their first exchange is cut as short singles; the fence between them is also a cut. Aike blows two holes in it, and once it is open the film holds them together in one two-shot. “Is that too hard for you?” “Absolutely.” It is a rare moment of candor from Aike this early, and it goes to a child, until a voice off-screen warns Danny away from “that creep.”

The presentation to the scouts makes the difficulty visible over time. It is the film’s longest take, roughly two and a half minutes from a fixed position at the back of the hut. Aike stands beside his model and explains the promise of nuclear energy (“Nuclear energy is the energy of the future”). The sustained shot lets us register not just the information he delivers but the engagement it produces. Applause has to be prompted. The performance of approval does not become interest. When he asks them to stay, they leave, and empty chairs fill the foreground.

Hayo’s response is similarly divided. A badge and a straightened neckerchief come with a criticism: the sodium circuit is the wrong way round, “kind of sloppy.” What might have been a moment of uncomplicated recognition is redirected toward a defect. He takes a photo “for Mummy,” then offers ice cream to the younger children only, and leaves Aike beside the display as the room empties.

The two audiences now stand side by side. The imagined one applauded a face in a bucket, loudly and without being asked. The real one applauds careful work only when told to, and thinly.

The model does not change, but its meaning does. During the presentation it is something he hopes will gather attention. Afterward it is the object beside which he has been left. Holding the scene lets one composition contain both.

The tracking shot that follows is the film’s first conspicuous traveling camera move. The camera travels backward ahead of Aike as he pushes the model home on a cart, then stops; in a locked frame, he smashes the model by hand. Movement does not automatically mean freedom or emotional progress; here it accompanies the continuation of isolation. That keeps the formal argument from becoming mechanical. The question is never simply whether the camera moves, but what relationship its position lets us see. At home he tells his mother there was a standing ovation, “from Dad too.”

Aike’s response to disappointment is increasingly practical. The audience follows him into the workshop now, and for the first time they speak (“You haven’t been online for ages”). He looks into the lens, and we find ourselves standing where they stand. He researches, telephones, and, with Miki coaching him to lower his voice, learns to present himself to people who might supply information or materials. Scientific ambition becomes a reason to speak. The boy who struggles with casual conversation can attempt a more confident role when there is a defined task.

This does not make the project safe, but it stops the film from treating his enthusiasm as merely a symptom to be removed. The undertaking develops capacities at the same time that it creates danger. He becomes more resourceful and more exposed.

Miki’s disclosure of her own loneliness belongs alongside that development: “Sometimes I’m alone quite a lot. Then I watch your stream. And then I feel less lonely. Or is that weird?” It is the first time anyone in the film says the word, and it gives him something different from public applause: the possibility that his presence matters to one particular person. The scene plays without score, so her confession is not turned into an announcement. The awkwardness remains, but it now has room for reciprocity.

The clock shop provides a darker counterpart. A shopkeeper tells him about radium dials and the Radium Girls. Then the reverse shot finds his audience standing among the clocks, holding up photographs of radium injuries. No stream is running; they have become something like an instant search result. The material Aike wants arrives with a history of harm attached, held up to him by the same crowd that will later urge him on. The film does not become a technical lesson, but neither does it let the object remain an innocent piece of eccentric equipment.

For the viewer, the sequence opens a widening gap between obtaining something and understanding what possessing it will mean. For Aike, another component has become available.

Other interactions complicate the idea that the world contains nothing but rejection. At the grocery store, a hiring obstacle gives way after Aike admits that he has no friends. An ordinary adult responds to an ordinary disclosure. He does not have to perform a scientific breakthrough to make himself legible.

"It Works"

The audience changes role again. In the workshop Aike asks where americium and thorium might be found, and individual followers answer him. They have become a reference desk.

Scouting supplies what they name. The theft is told in three locked frames. At the clubhouse the camera stands high and far back, at the open end of a horseshoe of scouts around the flagpole, and Aike is the small figure at the far left, slipping away. In the kitchen a leader eats a roll in the foreground, the storeroom keys on the counter beside his coffee, while Aike hides behind the counter in the background. In the storeroom he is tiny in a far doorway, collecting a box of camping lanterns. The framing that has excluded him all film now lets him steal. Nobody in the troop looks at the margins, so the margins are where he works.

Bram Doyer’s production design keeps the developing reactor connected to recognizable domestic life. The workshop holds shelves, tins, cables, tools, ordinary containers and repurposed objects. It does not become a gleaming laboratory because Aike’s ambition has grown.

That continuity matters. The project is assembled from the world he already inhabits, and it stays beside that world. He strips lanterns on the kitchen floor in his yellow apron while his mother crosses the hallway behind him. Her request to move the work into the workshop is a reasonable domestic boundary, but it cannot contain a danger whose scale she does not know. In scout uniform he orders a thousand smoke detectors from a wholesaler, in a wide shot that leaves both men tiny against an industrial wall: “It’s my dream to make all the scouting buildings safe.” “Imagine if a fire broke out.” “All those dead children.” Nobody cuts away to rescue the line.

The film lets care and insufficient knowledge coexist. Mirna feeds him, listens to him, and lets him lie with his head in her lap. In that scene the film uses alternating singles with her for the first time, while he lies to her most tenderly. “I promise, Mum.” “You’re a tiger.” “You’ll be careful, right?” “Sure.” Her hand crosses into his frame, but their eyes never meet: his are closed, then lowered, and hers are turned away. Her kindness is not evidence that the household is safe, any more than his enthusiasm is evidence that the experiment is under control.

The film has now built two views from Aike’s bedroom window, and they are deliberately opposed. Early on, through a thin curtain, he watched a few real boys across the street, small, blurred, turned toward one another. Now, asking how to get radium, he looks down at around eighteen followers packed against the wall below, every face turned up to him. “Doesn’t your mother work at the hospital?” “Like I can just walk in there.” “Pussy.” “Just steal it.” Then the chant: “Pussy, pussy, pussy”—the scouts’ insult in the audience’s mouths. Across his singles, Aike’s face shifts farther from the window as they escalate. Miki looks around uncertainly and drops her head. The real peers are out of reach; the imagined crowd is close enough to touch and does nothing but watch.

The visit to the radiology department turns the mismatch between care and knowledge into a small comic-thriller sequence. He takes his mother’s ID. A single take, watched through control-room glass, holds an X-ray, the staff leaving for lunch, the lights going out, and Aike slipping in as a silhouette. What he takes, he takes at a drawer in soft focus. The music gives his progress an awkwardly furtive momentum. Yet the interruption that matters is not an alarm or a security team. It is his mother’s coworker speaking to him.

The score stops when she calls. Conversation replaces the momentum of his private mission (“Looking for my mum.” “She’s not working today.” “Silly me.”). He attempts to leave, the music briefly returns, and another call interrupts him. An ordinary social exchange keeps puncturing the shape of an escape.

Because the coworker stays off-screen while her voice controls his movement, the sequence needs no elaborate coverage to establish power. Aike’s attempted exit and enforced return are enough. The suspense belongs as much to how long he can keep an ordinary manner as to whether anyone understands what he is doing.

Back in the workshop, the music recedes as the reactor is examined, and the film gives the object time to exist without musical insistence. We watch the test through the rig’s own grille, horizontal bars across every face. The counter produces a reading, and Miki says, “It works.” For Aike, the response converts a technical indication into personal recognition. The machine has done something; someone he wants to impress has witnessed it. The audience celebrates, Miki agrees to become his girlfriend, and the crowd lifts him out of the frame into the fantasy of being physically carried by the people who admire him. On the phone from a trampoline at dusk, he tells his father, “Then they won’t be able to ignore me.” “Because we won’t do it for less, right?” “Fine, son.”

The distinction between accomplishment and affection has temporarily disappeared. Scientific success, public approval, romantic acceptance and renewed confidence with his father occupy the same emotional passage. He is not merely pleased with a result. He has a place in the world.

Rutger Reinders’s score makes the change perceptible without needing an inventory of instruments. Every earlier cue sounded soured or unsettled. At Miki’s yes, the music becomes noticeably dreamlike and settled, the most completely settled musical passage we have identified. Molter described the recurring false notes as a child repeatedly trying, and failing, to play an instrument, the musical effort matching Aike’s attempts at connection.

The effect is not that the music certifies that Aike has solved his life. It lets the apparent solution feel convincing. It is worth noticing what that settled music is attached to: Aike’s imagined version of the girl he has been speaking with, a crowd that is not in the room, a father on a phone. That conviction will make the later contradictions hurt.

Belonging, Briefly

The bus to camp immediately complicates the triumph. It is a single fixed shot, and it sorts Aike’s two worlds by depth. Miki sits in the dark foreground. Aike walks back toward the camera to sit across the aisle from her. His “Sorry, I can’t talk at the moment,” and his promise of a date after camp, address the companion available in his subjective world, in the voice of someone taking a call in public. Nobody else on the bus looks at her. Then he gets up and walks into the depth of the frame, toward the scouts, and starts the conversation himself (“What’s up?” “What’s your favorite color candy?”). For the first time, he chooses the back of the picture.

The film does not suddenly make him fluent in group life. It lets confidence and awkwardness coexist.

At camp, his knowledge becomes useful to other people. When a few boys cannot light wet wood, his flask does it, and his offer to change the color of the fire (“I can make it green”) produces interest. In Bulldog he charges and is praised by name. Experiments that once belonged to a webcam now occupy an activity in which others are physically present and can respond to what he contributes. Camp replays the opening almost point for point, with the results reversed: the Bulldog he lost, the fire nobody reacted to, the night alone in the grass now spent asleep among four boys.

That response is not automatically healthier simply because it happens outdoors. The camp sequences still contain bravado, roughness and pleasure in risky behavior. The film has not replaced bad online people with an ideal community. It is testing whether something more reciprocal can emerge from an imperfect group.

The tent fire makes that complication impossible to ignore. The scene that leads to it does something new with the frame. Meerten is held sharply in the depth of the shot while blurred figures in the foreground talk over him, with Aike at their center. Molter has described the scene as a moment when Meerten becomes the outsider and the focus remains on him while the others talk. For one take, Aike is one of the bodies in front of someone else’s face. Then the tent goes up in a white flash. What might elsewhere be an emphatic action sequence is accompanied by a comparatively peaceful musical passage, and the image and score do not give the same instruction. We recognize danger while remaining inside the strange emotional space in which Aike’s experiments have begun to connect him to others. “You’re a nutcase, man,” someone says, and then they hug him.

The filmmaking refuses a neat equivalence between social progress and sensible conduct. He can be less alone during an event that remains a very bad idea.

The quieter conversation at the water’s edge offers a different measure of progress. Aike thanks Meerten for not sending him off on another humiliating errand. That is a modest basis for gratitude, but the modesty is the point. He is responding to someone who chose not to make him the joke.

Meerten answers with a disclosure of his own, “I joined the scouts because I had no friends,” which echoes Aike’s admission at the grocery store. The line plays over Aike’s face as he listens. Then: “This is better, right?” The question gives Aike room to agree rather than requiring him to impress. The exchange is embedded in the reeds and the movement toward the water. Neither boy stands before a formally arranged audience. The activity continues around them, and a connection becomes possible within it.

The music returns on that question, and it keeps some of its awkwardness, a slight detuning that sounds less sour than naive. The moment does not acquire the certainty of a finished transformation. It feels exploratory: an unfamiliar experience being tried, rather than a lesson mastered. When his followers appear in the reeds calling his name, he tells them, “Not right now, guys.”

At the closing circle the camera changes its own behavior. Earlier it watched the troop’s flag ceremony from high and far away. Now it stands close, at eye level, inside the group, with Aike at the center, laughing. Molter has explicitly described the change in framing: as Aike begins making friends, the compositions bring him physically closer to other people.

Back home, Aike’s response to the embodied audience is newly active. He pushes the remaining spectator into the backyard and closes the door. Their presence is no longer something he must passively accommodate. For this moment, he has something else to turn toward.

He gets into bed beside Mirna and tells her about camp. The film holds them in one shared frame with no cut, and the emphasis drifts away from the particulars of his account. His dialogue fades while the music rises. We do not need a complete report. The significant event is that he has an experience he wants to share with her, and for once nothing we have seen contradicts it.

This is a different use of a listener. Mirna does not need him to recreate the exciting parts for her entertainment. He can simply bring the feeling home.

The meeting with Miki then exposes the limits of another kind of belonging. Dressed for the occasion, roses in hand, Aike arrives at a bus stop with an image already formed. An older woman greets him and asks how he is. He answers, “Fine,” and walks out of the frame, which the film holds empty against the concrete. Only when she calls his name does he step back in.

The sequence matters because recognition does not happen through looking. He sees the person but not the relationship. His name supplies the information her appearance cannot. The film gives her an ordinary single, an ordinary eyeline, a public place, everything the young Miki never had. He drops the roses and leaves them on the pavement.

The credits distinguish the young Miki, played by Sastroredjo, from Barbara Sobels’s Gerda, identified as “Gerda (aka Miki).” The meeting reveals that the person Aike imagined is not the person who has been communicating with him. It does not establish every step by which that discrepancy came about.

Our reading of the encounter is less the exposure of a calculated trap than a collision between two lonely people who allowed different understandings of the relationship to continue. Aike accepted the attention and supplied a face, an age and a romantic possibility. In our reading, Gerda never clarified who was speaking with him sufficiently to prevent that imagined person from taking hold.

The uncertainty does not make the encounter painless or remove the question of responsibility. It makes the pain harder to assign to a single act of villainy. The companionship could have been genuinely comforting without meaning what Aike hoped it meant. What collapses is not necessarily every feeling exchanged, but his confidence that he knew who was beside him. In hindsight it also explains the young Miki’s strange ease of presence. She was Aike’s picture of someone real, and the film’s first “lonely” came out of her mouth.

Crying in the reeds, he takes a call from a friend from camp. “How was your date?” “You okay?” “Wanna join us? We’re at the pool.” “Bring your shit, we’ll blow some things up. You’ll probably feel better.” It is the question the online audience once asked, now asked by a real person with a time and a place attached.

"Nobody"

The Geiger counter changes the terms of the film. Until now, much of Aike’s activity has been aimed at producing a visible response. The device registers something he cannot see.

We first watch it through the reactor’s grille again, the same bars that framed his triumph. He switches the counter off and on, then the reactor, and the reading does not fall. He carries it through the workshop, the yard, the bedroom, the living room, and eventually the street. The repeated crackling connects spaces that had seemed separable. The workshop is not a sealed zone of ambition. Its consequences reach the rooms where people sleep and the neighborhood where they go about their day. At one point he looks into the lens through the bars. Earlier looks into the lens had an audience behind us. This one has the machine.

For much of this exploration, the sound of the device dominates without a score telling us how frightened to be. The danger is not rendered as a glowing cloud or a spectacular transformation. Houses, fences, furniture and people go on looking ordinary. The instrument makes that ordinary appearance unreliable.

The neighbor boy’s question, whether Aike is going to blow something up, belongs to the old relationship between experiment and entertainment. He asks it twice. The second time, Aike answers: “Not today, I’m afraid.” It is the first spectacle he refuses. The spectacle everyone knows how to recognize may not be the danger that matters.

By the time he is standing down the street and still getting a strong reading, the problem has spread beyond his private project. For the first time the reverse shots are filled by real bystanders, teenagers by a moped and old men in deckchairs, looking at him from outside his story. The returning sourness of the score reinforces the alarm, but the device has already made the connection.

When Aike confronts his audience in the backyard, their arrangement no longer promises support. They stand at eye level along the fence, no longer framed from above or facing the lens. He tells them the reactor is leaking radiation. They stay where they are. He appeals again, then physically pulls at one person’s clothing, trying to propel them toward help. They hold their ground. When he leaves, the frame stays on them.

The staging lets him make contact with the visualized audience without granting it the practical capacities of neighbors standing in his yard. This is not a crowd of residents inexplicably ignoring an emergency. These bodies represent an online relationship. Their visible closeness has always exceeded what that relationship could actually provide. He could push them out of his house. He cannot push them toward the world.

His mother’s illness makes the problem immediate. She is on the sofa, sweating. Asked if she is all right, she says “Yes,” much as he once answered her with “Sure.” He asks about nausea, headaches and nosebleeds. When she asks how he knew, he says he has heard something is going around. The reassurance offers a harmless explanation for knowledge that frightens him.

The exchange holds affection and concealment together. Aike is trying to assess whether he has hurt her while avoiding the explanation that would tell her why he is asking. The person whose concern he could seek is also the person he fears he has endangered. He tells her to go and lie down.

His call to Hayo reaches the same voicemail greeting, cut off this time before it finishes. He throws the phone, and the impact lands with a substantial, ordinary sound. After all the visualized company, there is something blunt about that collision: a real object answering his frustration by hitting something.

The bathroom concentrates the film’s different kinds of presence. Mirrors repeat Aike while the audience occupies his space in soft focus. The close framing and the camera’s small pan do not remove the spectators; they keep their silent availability around his face as he asks them outright for help.

He tells them he thinks his mother has radiation sickness. He warns that the contamination is reaching the neighborhood. “Help” is no longer an implicit wish beneath a performance. It is a direct request.

They do not answer.

His “Fuck you” is followed by Mirna asking who he is shouting at. “Nobody,” he says. The reply hides the encounter from her while naming its literal condition. There is nobody physically there.

The more important change is in Aike’s relationship to that absence. Earlier, applause let him experience the audience as a form of support. Now he asks for the thing he had mistaken their attention for, and the difference becomes unavoidable.

Naming them does not make them leave. When he buries his face in a towel and screams further profanities, audible but unsubtitled, they are still standing soft behind him. The gesture is not simply another image of collapse. His mother has shown she can hear him. He needs an outlet and muffles it so as not to alarm her further. For the first time in the audience’s presence, he gives them nothing to watch, and his behavior is being shaped by concern for a real person outside the immediate exchange.

He can resent the spectators and protect his mother in the same moment. The film does not reduce distress to a loss of all judgment.

The Show Goes On

Alone in bed, Aike calls for Miki. He apologizes and asks her to come online. After the meeting has dismantled his certainty about her, he still wants contact.

That appeal stops the relationship from being dismissed as a simple mistake he has now outgrown. The emotional need survives the revelation. So does the possibility that there was something worth wanting beneath the image he built.

No answer comes. The reverse shot that used to produce her now shows an empty corner of the room. The only face that answers him is his own reflection in the window.

His effort to remove the reactor begins without the assurance of either an audience or a partner. He puts on the gas mask and apron and returns to the workshop. The equipment gives him the outline of someone prepared for hazardous work, but the surrounding space stays stubbornly improvised.

His breathing sets the scene with the machine. The close view of an eye behind the mask keeps the frightened person inside the costume. It reverses the earlier demonstrations: he is no longer the expert who knows what will happen. He has to approach the thing he made.

The cart’s journey through the night lets suspense and ungainly comedy share the same action. It is the same cart the camera once tracked by daylight, now watched from fixed positions. Getting equipment over a fence and moving an unwieldy load through residential streets never become sleek feats of competence. The difficulty stays physical. Objects fall. Movement stops. He has to recover, adjust and continue.

The returning music builds tension but keeps giving way to interruptions. The film does not grant Aike the uninterrupted momentum of an action hero. An awkward piece of equipment and an observing neighbor can puncture the performance.

That neighbor gets a shot of their own. We watch Aike under a streetlamp, unloading parts, through a window in a darkened house. A light goes on, a figure enters, watches, leaves, and a phone is audibly dialed. For a rare moment, the film takes the vantage of an outside observer rather than staying close to Aike’s experience; the observation ends with a call to the police.

In the street, the wide views leave him small beside the load. Streetlights illuminate limited areas, and he moves between them with the thing he is trying to take away from everyone else. The reactor has changed from an achievement displayed for attention into a burden that has to be carried.

When the police stop him, the cars and their lights reorganize the frame. They close it on both sides and leave him dead center under the lamp. The composition offers a pointed echo of the closing circle, another moment when Aike stood prominently at the center of a group. There it was his friends; here it is the police. The situation he tried to manage privately has become public in a way he cannot control.

Real spectatorship now appears alongside the audience the film has been visualizing. A neighbor films him on a phone from an upper window; the act of watching has become an ordinary, physical part of the neighborhood. Mirna stands behind police tape, wrapped in a blanket. The tape’s printing reads backwards, which places the camera inside the cordon, on the contaminated side, with him. Her distance from him is enforced and physical, but her expression offers something the closer, invented company never did.

The applause at about 1:10:48 completes the audience’s established behavior rather than reversing it. They smile and clap as Aike is driven away. The applause is genuine, but it is not congratulations. They have been given an absorbing show, and they respond as they always have: with enthusiasm for the spectacle.

Their pleasure in his willingness to endanger himself has been present from the beginning. What changes is his ability to receive that pleasure as affection. The boy who welcomed applause after the gnome and the tanning experiment is now applauded at his downfall. We read the moment as part of Aike’s dawning recognition that their enjoyment never guaranteed concern for what happens to him. The film has prepared it carefully: he called them “Nobody” minutes before they clap.

The film also leaves a question for its own viewer. We have been entertained by some of the same events: the delayed explosion, the awkward improvisation, the escalating absurdity. Molter has described the viewer of his films as a bystander, even a ramptoerist—a disaster tourist—and has explained that the distant camera leaves the viewer to experience discomfort that cutting might otherwise direct toward the character. That description becomes uncomfortable here, because the film has given spectatorship a visible human shape. Both audiences watched Aike get hurt. Only one of them was asked to feel it.

The point is not that laughter proves an absence of empathy. It is that enjoyment and care are different responses, and one cannot safely be inferred from the other.

The clean-up then revisits familiar spaces under changed conditions. All film long, the camera has held empty frames before Aike entered them. Now it holds the places he has left: a meadow, a body-shaped hollow pressed into tall grass. Protective suits occupy the workshop doorway (framed exactly as when Aike once carried smoke detectors through it), the yard (seen through bars), and the living room. The fireplace and the photograph of mother and son stay in place while someone moves past them with a meter, where Aike once stood with his own counter.

These returns let production design carry consequence. The film needs no newly invented disaster landscape. Rooms we already know become disturbing because of who can now enter them, what they must wear and what they are doing.

The mother’s place on the sofa returns too, seen from above. Cushions, a blanket, a yellow mug, tissues and medicine preserve the shape of her everyday life while the emergency changes our understanding of the space. The hazard has reached the person, not merely the project. Outside, neighbors gather behind the tape. Hayo finally arrives at the house, and he is on the phone.

On the Other Side

The hospital appears to put Aike in a more absolute isolation than anything before. He lies in bed with oxygen tubing across his face, separated from others by translucent plastic. People beyond it can be seen only imperfectly.

Then another bed is wheeled in, and the camera pans to follow it. The movement reveals a relationship the partition obscures: his mother is beside him.

This is not the first time the camera has moved, and it would flatten the film to claim that movement is suddenly invented for tenderness. What changes is its use. It opens the scene toward another person while preserving the barrier that makes reaching her difficult.

The arrangement reverses the earlier treatment of the online audience. Those spectators could occupy his room with perfect clarity while offering no practical companionship. Mirna is obscured, separated and hard to see, yet her presence is responsive.

Aike calls her “Mummy” and apologizes. Hands approach the plastic from opposite sides. The material gives under the contact, and the hands close around each other through it. Eventually she opens her arms, and he moves into an embrace through the partition.

The barrier does not disappear to reward the feeling. It stays between their faces and bodies. The comfort is neither a fantasy of restored safety nor a denial of what has happened. They have to find a way to hold each other under the conditions his actions helped create.

The image changes the meaning of physical distance across the whole film. Aike could stand beside his father and fail to complete a hug. He could be carried by a crowd whose support did not extend to helping him. The film has been full of thresholds: door glass, the curtain at his window, a guard booth, a reactor grille, control-room glass. This is the one people reach through. An actual obstruction cannot entirely prevent an embrace.

Molter’s own experience of hospital isolation during cancer treatment gives this passage a specific personal context. He has described months in hospital, kept apart because chemotherapy had left him vulnerable to infection, and the loneliness of it as the origin of his urge to make a film about loneliness. That experience does not determine the scene’s meaning, but it clarifies the lived importance of being cut off from ordinary contact.

Blanken identified the hospital embrace as his hardest scene. He struggled to reach the emotional state and was given the time and quiet to find it. The result matters partly because it differs from the small, contained adjustments that carry so much of the earlier performance.

Aike’s face no longer needs to keep up the appearance of an experimenter, a confident son, or someone who can win an audience back. The framing is now the closest the film has come to him: his ear, the side of his face, filling the screen. That closeness lets grief, shame, affection and relief stay tangled rather than each being assigned an explanatory line.

The voices outside bring a final kind of attention. “Aikey, hey.” “You hear us, Aike?” “We miss you.” “We’re there for you.” “This one is for you, man.” Fireworks follow. We hear them; we never see them.

The film keeps the source off-screen while staying with Aike’s response. That choice avoids turning the gesture into another display of people arranged around him. We hear an attempt to reach him, and we see that it does. His real friends arrive the way his family always did, as voices. The audience of strangers does not come to the hospital at all.

There is an important complication in the return of fireworks. The ending does not resolve the story by replacing explosions with something wholly respectable. The language of spectacle remains. But Aike is no longer required to supply the risk in order to get the response. The film opened with him setting off a blast for watchers; it ends with someone setting one off for him.

Nor does he have to prove that he is entertaining company while lying in a hospital bed. He is missed in his absence. That is something applause could not establish.

His expression changes, from tears to a smile, and he stays in the embrace. The film lets the contact from outside matter without letting it replace the person holding him. Different forms of companionship can now coexist without being mistaken for the same thing.

The score registers the change, and its restraint is precise. Sorrowful when Mirna is wheeled in, it turns upward during the embrace and is almost in tune by the time the fireworks begin. To our ear, it carries into the credits still a little short of the settled sound the film gave to Miki’s yes. The most completely settled music we have identified belongs to an imagined acceptance. The real one, on our listening, comes close.

This One Is for You

Nuclear Boy makes loneliness visible by repeatedly separating appearance from function. A full room can contain no help. A shared location can preserve a painful distance. A conversation that disappoints romantic expectations can still have offered genuine comfort. A plastic partition can obstruct two people without making their relationship less real.

The filmmaking works through those distinctions rather than announcing them. Blocking gives online communication a body. Selective sound makes that body’s presence incomplete. Sustained shots let attention arrive, falter and depart without cutting away from the person left behind, and the cut, when it comes, marks where people fail to reach each other. The camera’s distance often reflects the distance the world keeps; its most consequential closeness comes when another person reaches Aike. Repeated locations show the cost of an ambition spreading beyond the space assigned to it. Camera movement becomes one available means of changing a relationship, not an automatic symbol of liberation. And a score built from false notes reaches for, and almost finds, its key.

The style costs something. The distance can read as coldness, the detuned music sets teeth on edge, and Mitchell van Vuren, writing for FilmTotaal, questioned whether the film gives Aike sufficient room to develop beyond his predicament, arguing that its moral resolution arrives too neatly. The coldness is also the vantage the film assigns us: an onlooker’s distance rather than a confidant’s intimacy. That distance narrows in identifiable moments as Aike begins to find company.

There’s a simpler reading available, and it’s worth naming rather than passing over. It would be tidy to treat Nuclear Boy as a cautionary tale about the internet: strangers online egg a lonely boy toward disaster, real friends offline bring him back. That reading isn’t wrong. It’s thinner than what the staging supports. It explains the applause at the arrest. It doesn’t explain why the real scouts first watched Aike as coldly as any follower, why his friends win him over with the same appetite for blowing things up, why a neighbor’s first act is to film him, or why the most completely settled music we have identified belongs to the fantasy. The film doesn’t oppose online to offline. It opposes being watched to being answered, and real people can do either.

That’s the transferable lesson. Online attention doesn’t have to be shown on screens; it can be staged as bodies, and then the audience’s behavior, rather than a speech, carries the critique. Camera distance can be set by the social world instead of by the protagonist’s importance, and withdrawn only as that world lets him in. Cuts can be rationed so that separation becomes legible, and a shared frame can mean something when it holds. A score can be detuned as a performance of effort and allowed to approach its key without quite arriving. The method has costs: months of rehearsal behind a nineteen-day shoot, a lead performance whose discomfort must stay small enough to miss, and a viewer who may read the distance as indifference. But the distance never makes Aike less important. It makes him exactly as visible as the people around him allow.

The film’s compassion does not require us to excuse Aike’s decisions. His hunger for recognition helps explain the project without making its consequences harmless. What the ending offers is not proof that everything will be repaired, but a different experience of being valued.

At the beginning, he gets back on his feet after an explosion and receives applause. At the end, he is injured, apologetic, and unable to give anyone a performance. A voice still calls for him. His mother still opens her arms.

The difference is not that someone is finally watching. It is that someone is answering.

Editorial Postscript

Version note. This study uses a private English-subtitled Vimeo screener of Nuclear Boy, supplied by director Joren Molter, as its timestamp and content master. The screener runs approximately 78 minutes including credits; the narrative ends at about 1:15:20, followed by title-card credits and a scrolling crawl, with no post-credit sequence. Its displayed picture measures approximately 1.5:1. Molter has described a separate cinema version with a narrower frame; this study has not compared the two, and the framing observations here apply to the supplied screener. The film was commissioned by broadcaster EO as a Telefilm and broadcast on NPO 3 on February 21, 2026. Some festival listings identify the film as a 2025 production; this study uses the 2026 Dutch broadcast and copyright year. Shooting-day figures differ slightly: Molter and Broadcast Magazine give nineteen, while Blanken recalls twenty. This study uses nineteen.

Credits. Joren Molter directed from a screenplay by Britt Snel. Floor Onrust produced for Family Affair Films, with Arnoud Bruinier as co-producer for EO and Mendy Post as line producer. Roy van Egmond, NSC, was director of photography, shooting on the ARRI Alexa Mini, and Emiel Nuninga edited. Rutger Reinders composed the score, which won Best Original Score at the 2026 Brooklyn Film Festival. Jan Schermer designed the sound; Tijn Hazen was supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer, and Koos van der Vaart recorded production sound. Bram Doyer was production designer, Heleen Heintjes costume designer, and Joan Tjon A Hie headed hair and make-up. Casting was by Marina Wijn and Madelief Blanken. Practical effects are credited to SFX Verstraete; Storm handled image post-production, with Menno Haas as visual effects supervisor. The principal cast includes Guus Blanken (Aike), Jelka van Houten (Mirna), Kiara Sastroredjo (Miki), Horace Cohen (Hayo), Teun Stokkel (Meerten), Colin Staelens (Danny), and Barbara Sobels, credited as “Gerda (aka Miki).” The film credits seven online followers by name, in addition to the larger groups seen on screen. It draws on news reports about David Hahn; this study does not independently investigate the real case.

A note on sourcing. This study was built from a blind chronological viewing of the director-supplied screener, logged from the first frame of each setup, followed by a separate pass mapping the score. Scene-level observations—including actions, approximate timestamps, framing, shot duration, dialogue, sound placement, and music cues—come from those viewings. Production facts, interviews, and critical responses were examined separately, after the film had raised the relevant questions. Their roles remain distinct: released-film observation; documented production history; filmmaker and performer commentary; critical reception; and Atlantis interpretation.

The central propositions—that camera distance often follows Aike’s social distance, that cuts can articulate separation, and that the film contrasts being watched with being answered—are the interpretation of this study, not claims attributed to the filmmakers. Dialogue follows the screener’s English subtitles, which translate the Dutch-language performances. Where Dutch interviews are discussed in English, their remarks are paraphrased or presented in translation rather than represented as verbatim English statements.

The score’s instrumentation was not independently established; one critic hears a small orchestra, while this study relies on the listening observations of the screener without claiming a particular set of instruments. The view that Miki’s acceptance is accompanied by the most settled musical passage, and that the hospital music approaches but does not quite reach that quality, is likewise an interpretation. Molter’s observation that the music becomes beautiful when Aike gets friends is not assigned here to a definitive cue. Finally, neither the film nor the outside sources reviewed establish Gerda’s intentions. The reading of the encounter as a sad collision of lonely expectations belongs to this study. Molter’s general use of “catfished” in an interview should not be imposed as a definitive judgment about Gerda. Sources were checked on October 15, 2026.

Sources and research

  • Nuclear Boy, private English-subtitled Vimeo screener supplied by Joren Molter. The governing source for the film’s actions, framing, dialogue, score cues, and timestamps.
  • Devi Smits, “Joren Molter over Telefilm Nuclear Boy,”, Filmkrant, February 18, 2026. The single-take approach, camera distance, the viewer as bystander, Molter’s childhood, and his filmmaking influences. Originally published in Dutch.
  • Nuclear Boy film listing, Brooklyn Film Festival, 2026. Best Original Score winner; the listing describes the film as a 2025 Netherlands production.
  • Tony Tellez, “Heartland: Nuclear Boy,”, Film Yap, October 10, 2026. Reception evidence, including a contrasting impression of the score’s instrumentation.

 

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