Phishing, malware,  botnet, firewall, darkweb, access control, backdoor, brute force, data leak, DDoS, keylogger, exploit, rootkit, script kid, trojan, these and many other terms are used , on a daily basis, within the universe of hackers and Cybersecurity.

There are not many films that try to take a look inside this dark world, in a perpetual and unstable balance between legality and illegality and “WHOAMI” is one of these.

2014, the Swiss naturalized German director, Boran Bo Odar, debuts with this work (of which he is also the screenwriter) and the work wins in many festivals highlighting the remarkable skills of the newcomer.

Baran Bo Odar, later, will be the creator of the “Dark” series (2017-2020) which will have great success with the public and criticism and, subsequently, of the much unfairly maligned series "1899" (2022) which will be abandoned at the end of the first season for somewhat specious reasons on the part of Netflix.

In this film the viewer begins to get to know an unknown, submerged world, which is well below the World Wide Web that we all use every day: down there you can find everything and the opposite of everything, you can find violence, blackmail and deaths but also dictated fights by rigid political-social ideals.

The film focuses on the story of a hacker named Benjamin (played by Tom Schilling) who on the web goes by the name “WHOAMI” (all attached which translated means “Who am I?”)  and the story starts from the end: Benjamin has finally been arrested by the Cybercrimes section of Interpol, after several months of hunting, and is now under interrogation by the Chief of the Cybercrimes Section Hannah Lindberg who hopes that come clean and reveal the names of his fighting companions.

Benjamin wants to start from scratch by telling his story from the beginning: his mother commits suicide when he was 8 years old and his father abandoned his wife before he was even born. The child then lives with his maternal grandmother until she too dies of Alzheimer's and he remains alone.

Ignored by everyone and subjected, year after year, to acts of school bullying, Benjamin takes refuge in the He studies IT and begins to acquire skills and experience but although he is becoming a well-known hacker, his dream is to overcome his myth: MRX, the hacker of all hackers.

Sentenced to 4 months of community service, Benjamin makes a casual acquaintance with Max, a boy older than him who also seems to be a hacker and shortly after the boy introduces him to his friends but, underneath, he hides an intent : he wants to understand if Benjamin is really smart and ready to join his team made up of Stephan (Software wizard) and Paul (hardware wizard).

Although their antics are excellent from a technical point of view, MRX mocks them and belittles them by calling them amateur and childish.

Injured in the Benjamin and the rest of the group decide to do what no hacker has ever attempted: to violate the Bundensbank servers…

Hence the attacks scene follows one another until the ending which closes the film in a satisfying way. Recommended for everyone.