IT is perhaps inevitable that we are still catching up with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, who worked practically at the speed of thought and who died of a drug overdose in 1982 at 37, leaving behind more than 40 films. “World on a Wire,” an obscure two-part television movie he made in 1973, is a textbook example of a film that was ahead of its time. Head-trip cinema about virtual-reality immersions, it’s an analog-age “Avatar,” a movie that anticipates “Blade Runner” in its meditation on artificial and human intelligence and “The Matrix” in its conception of reality as a computer-generated illusion.

Since its broadcast on German television in October 1973, “World on a Wire” has gone largely unseen. Digitally restored by the Fassbinder Foundation under the supervision of its original cinematographer, Michael Ballhaus, a spiffed-up version of the three-and-a-half-hour film had its premiere in February at the Berlin Film Festival. Before that  according to Juliane Lorenz, Fassbinder’s longtime editor and the president of the Fassbinder Foundation  it had been shown on the big screen only a handful of times, at retrospectives in the ’90s. The film is set to receive its first ever theatrical run at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from April 14 through 19.

Adapted from “Simulacron-3,” a 1964 novel by Daniel F. Galouye, “World on a Wire” revolves around a cybernetics corporation that has created a miniature world populated with “identity units” unaware that they are being controlled from above. Toggling between dimensions, a researcher (Klaus Lowitsch) learns that what he has always known as the real world may itself be a simulation. This is the brand of existential horror that Philip K. Dick perfected (notably in “Time Out of Joint”) but that took off cinematically only in the late ’90s, in a subgenre that the writer Joshua Clover, in his book on “The Matrix,” terms “edge of the construct.” (Among the other movies in this cluster are “The Truman Show” and “The Thirteenth Floor,” another adaptation of “Simulacron-3,” for which Mr. Ballhaus was an executive producer.)

“We knew almost nothing about computers,” said Fritz Muller-Scherz, who wrote “World on a Wire” with Fassbinder. “But Rainer and I were fascinated by the question, If there are other artificial worlds, how can a real world even exist?”