Micro-review · 1920
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)
- Directed by
- Robert Wiene
- Country
- Germany
- Running time
- About 76 minutes
- Our rating
- ★★★★ 4/5
The sets are painted on, the shadows are painted on, and the whole town leans like it's about to fall over. Conrad Veidt's sleepwalker is the image you'll keep. The story is thin but the look is so strong you stop caring. Horror starts here.
The longer review
A traveling showman named Dr. Caligari arrives at a fair in a small German town with a sideshow attraction: Cesare, a young man who has slept for 23 years and will answer any question you ask him. That night, people in town start dying.
Werner Krauss plays Caligari as a hunched, spiteful little man in a top hat. Conrad Veidt, rail-thin in a black leotard, plays Cesare, and he does most of his acting with his eyes and his arms. The scene where he opens his eyes for the first time, slowly, in close-up, is still one of the creepiest moments in horror.
But the real star is the design. Nothing in the town is square. Streets bend, doorways are triangles, windows are jagged shards, and light and shadow are painted directly onto the walls and floors. It's the best-known example of Expressionism in film, and the style was a practical choice as much as an artistic one: painted canvas was cheap. It gives the whole movie the feel of a dream someone is telling you, which turns out to be the point.
The story, credited to Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, has a frame around it that changes how you read everything before it. We won't spoil it, but it's been argued over for a century, including whether it softens the film's suspicion of authority. The pacing in the middle is slow, and some of the acting outside the two leads is stagey. As an influence on everything from film noir to Tim Burton, it's hard to overstate.
Before you watch
The 2014 restoration from the Murnau Foundation, with color tinting, is far better than the washed-out prints that circulated for decades. Lengths vary between versions.