| Director | Nic Mathieu |
|---|---|
| Budget | $70 million |
DARPA engineer Mark Clyne is sent to an American military airbase in Chișinău, to investigate the death of Delta Force operator Chris Davis, who is sent there as part of General James Orland's initiative to support the Moldovan government against anti-government insurgency in an ongoing civil war. The military forces involved are equipped with Clyne's latest invention, a line of hyperspectral imaging goggles, which picks up an unknown entity that is invisible to the naked eye and kills almost instantaneously. The signal intelligence ops initially wrote it off as interference, but Clyne believes the sightings to be legitimate, while CIA Case Officer Fran Madison believes the sightings to be local insurgency members wearing an advanced form of active camouflage technology and has orders from her superiors to retrieve any sample of it.
Orland assigns Clyne and Madison to a Delta Force team led by Major Sessions on an extraction mission to locate their missing Utah team at Durlești. There they find Comstock, one of the few survivors of the team, hiding under a bathtub, when a group of entities–who are impervious to firearms and explosives–attack the group. However, as they retreat, their vehicles ran over a landmine, killing Comstock and forcing them to take shelter in an abandoned factory inhabited by another surviving Utah team member, Chen, and two Slovene siblings; Sari and Bogdan. Their late father had surrounded the factory with iron filings to deter the entities, known locally as "Aratare", from entering the premises.
After establishing radio contact with the airbase, the team construct IEDs and grenades laced with iron filings and set out to an alternate extraction point on foot as the entities bypass the surrounding filings. Reaching an alternate extraction point at an abandoned plaza, the group barely manages to escape, but not before Bogdan loses his life to the entities.
The group are redirected to a Moldovan-controlled civilian bunker as the airbase was evacuated after being overrun by the entities. Using information gathered from Sari, Clyne deduces the apparitions are made of Bose–Einstein condensate, making them incapable of passing through iron and ceramic materials, which explains Comstock’s initial survival and the entities' difficulty in passing through tank armor plating. Working overnight with Orland and surviving military engineers, he constructs ceramic armored suits and makeshift pulse weapons. The next morning, Clyne, Madison, and the remaining Delta operators head out for the power plant in Masrov, where Clyne deduces it can generate enough electricity to power the condensate and is also where all the entity encounters first started.
While the troops mount an offensive distraction on the roof of the plant, Clyne and Madison descend into a laboratory underneath it. There they discover the former regime's scientists had mass-produced the condensate entities as molecular copies of human test subjects' remains, whose peripheral nervous systems were hooked up to a central machine that keeps the copies alive. When the civil war broke out, the facility was damaged and some of the entities escaped, killing everyone inside and leading to a current situation. With the battle above threatening to release the remaining condensates, Clyne manages to activate the failsafe that deactivates them. He also unplugs the human remains from the machine, finally letting them die in peace.
With the apparitions gone, the US and allied Moldovan military resume their work of taking control of the city from the insurgents while the DoD considers reverse engineering the condensate machine for wartime purposes. Clyne bids goodbye to Orland, Sari, and Madison, and is airlifted back home.