Tim Fehrenbach’s review published on Letterboxd:
watching this is like diving into the realms of a photo album out of a long lost, far away past. with a feel to it as if your actually turning the pages, one by one. so meaningfully one scene builds into the next. this is of course a work as influential as it gets. a silent film teaching the afterworld everything it needs to know about visual storytelling. it's all here. expressionist images that are like still lifes capturing the essence of the story that is being told, burning their way deep into one's mind.
the emotional farewell scene, the episode of our naive, overly optimistic hero arriving in the beautiful carpathian landscape. the gentle eyed, frightened hyena retracing into the woods. the geniusely terrifying carriage to castle sequence. all this increasingly foreshadowing the downfall of a world soaked in dark romanticizm with heavy undercurrents of the doom to come. and the dread constantly builds, more and more inhabiting these images, rats, coffins, decay and sickness wherever we look. all this long before Count Orlok a la Dracula finally invades the city. it's such a good tight tension build up to the fully materializing dread of the last act.
Murnau truly managed to bring an athmospherically nightmarish world to life. my 1922 self is deeply disturbed and bat shit scared. today I'm mostly amazed about to what great extend german expressionism was able to dip into the cultural sobconscious. showcasing a world fallen to pieces, with everyone slipping from the unbearable reality of national trauma full of loss and unmet guilt into the regression of a dreamlike dark gothic world mirroring this malaise. trying to somehow uncover reason and collective meaning in these realms of dire, grotesque symbolism. equally revealing that something was brewing deep behind the surface of german society, giving an early prophecy of the horrific catastrophic turn of events looming ahead.
this is truly sensational. the birth of modern horror. deeply unsettling and moving if you let it fully evolve and immerse you. early cinematic perfection.
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