Cast: Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt

Director: Robert Wiene

Screenplay: Hans Janowitz

Running time: 1 hr 31 mins

Genre: Horror/Suspense



CRITIQUE:


German expressionist films are like cinematic Marmite – it’s either up to your taste, or dreadfully loathes it. But whether you like the 1919 art-oddity that is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari or not, there’s no denying its ripples in the horror genre just as what Fritz Lang’s Metropolis did to contemporary sci-fi. From the cinema of Tim Burton to Terry Gilliam, from Nosferatu to Frankenstein and even Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, this Gothic masterclass innovation has an influential status in world cinema with its peculiarly psychedelic sets, dark, contrasty picture, and the air of dread. This highly creepy tale of a fairground showman-cum-psychiatry-doctor, the titular Dr. Caligari, who hypnotise Cesare, a somnambulist by day, murderer by night, feels like a nightmarish landscape of faraway stories you here around a campfire, but all is not what it seems. The unusually painted sets, distorted lines, warped shapes, sharp angles, create an illusion of a jagged hyper-reality rarely seen in cinema, even in the weirdest films you’ve ever seen. Wiene established an off-kilter, canted world, and tints his black-and-white picture with sepia-amber for interior and fairground scenes, rosy pink for dramatic echoes, and bluish for night-time events. The results are unforgettable images, both distracting and disturbing, with the actors’ ghostly, heavy make-up offset by the set’s lingeringly ominous mood. A silent film, one has to put up reading narrative templates and as an early film, it is flawed as it can be, but that’s ignoring the fact that is such a superb kickstart of a sinister genre, where nothing is what it seems – the psychotic horror-dramas of our time, with that killer twist at the end.


VERDICT:

Along with Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and M, Wiene’s shadowy masterpiece is a disconcerting affair with the dark, and truly an apotheosis of the German Expressionist cinematic movement.



RATING: A