The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

 

Where to Watch: YouTube (free)

***1/2

This review will probably contain spoilers. I don't know - I haven't written it yet. If you're the kind of person who cares about that sort of thing, I recommend you go and watch the movie before reading this. I give it my seal of approval, it's free in various editions on YouTube, and really there are a lot of worse ways to spend an hour and change. But, truth be told, if you're reading this blog you're probably the sort of person who is already inclined to know a bit about Caligari, and so you probably know the twist endings (both the awesome one that was originally intended, and the puzzling and only mildly successful one that got tacked on after the producers got cold feet). So in the end I'd recommend you read on. This movie came out 105 years ago, for God's sake. I feel like that's well past the statute of limitations for spoilers.

The first thing anyone talks about with Caligari is the mise-en-scene. And fair enough. On a visual level this film is incredible. Everyone's familiar these days with the tropes of expressionist film making. From Universal Horror to film noir to Tim Burton, it's everywhere. But even Tim Burton at his wildest never pushed things this far. A lot of first are only really suggestions which others build upon - Caligari is the motherlode, a film so defiant in its visual weirdness that only animation has even come close to matching its aesthetic. But luckily, this is not an example of style over substance. This is style as substance. The dissonant proportions of furniture and buildings, the painted on shadows, the striking use of lighting, the exaggerated acting, and the almost wholesale discarding of right angles in the set design - all of this works together to create a funhouse mirror effect. Caligari, coming only a few years after the monolithic fuck-up that was the Great War, is a visual representation of a world gone mad. 

It's also the story of a mad man. Or two mad men, sort of (more of that later). A small town in Germany is hosting it's annual fair, and one of the exhibits is a real doozy. A spectacularly creeping looking guy named Dr. Caligari is exhibiting his pet somnambulist, Cesare (the ever dependable Conrad Veidt). Not only has Cesare slept almost continually for the whole 23 years of his life, but Caligari can call the sleepwalker out of his trance and get him to tell the future. This is troubling for one of the people in attendance - a studious and melancholy young man named Alan. When he askes how long he has to live, Cesare tells him he will be dead by dawn.

And as it turns out, Cesare is right on the money. Alan is murdered that night by a mysterious figure who appears only in silhouette. As it turns out, this is the second murder to rock the town - the town clerk, who was kind of a dick to Caligari, was found murdered the day before.

It doesn't take long for Alan's friend Franzis to put two and two together and figure out that Cesare is probably the murderer. The only problem is that he spends almost a whole night staking out Caligari's caravan and never sees Cesare stir from the titular cabinet. This despite the fact that Franzis' girlfriend Jane is at the same time abducted from her bedchamber by the somnambulist, who Caligari sent to kill her but who decided in the end that maybe it would be nice to have some female companionship after spending 23 years sleeping in a weird box. The long and short of all this is that Caligari is discovered as the evil mastermind controlling Cesare, while Cesare drops dead of exshaustion in a field after lugging a grown woman across half a town's worth of rooftops. Franzis pursues a fleeing Caligari to the local insane asylum, and it's here that the first big twist appears. Caligari is none other than the director of the asylum!

Yes, it turns out that Caligari, a specialist in somnambulism, has spent his whole life waiting for a case like Cesare to be admitted to his asylum. Why, you ask? Because it's been his life long dream to replicate the exploits of the original Caligari, who more or less did exactly what the mad doctor did with his Cesare, only several hundred years earlier and in Italy. With the help of the asylum staff, Franzis is able to capture Caligari and lock him away for good. And there you have it - a powerful metaphor for authority gone mad and the ways in which those in power exploit the masses by lulling them into a state of mindless apathy and compelling them to toil in the name of insane goals. And then there's the twist.

I actually like the first part of the tacked on frame narrative, because it consists of Franzis explaining to an old man that he's been to hell and back, and then his girlfriend Jane walks by and she's so shell-shocked she's basically a zombie. It's a solid way to start a film, and immediately establishes that the stakes are going to be pretty damned high. Those stakes do turn out to be high, too - this movie might occasionally seem a little quaint to the modern viewer, but in 1920 it must have hit audiences like a waking nightmare. Still, the resolution only kind of works. In the end, it's revealed that Franzis is an inmate in the asylum, the various characters from the main part of the film are other inmates he's projecting on, and "Caligari" really is the Director of the asylum, but he's also a kindly old man confident that he will finally be able to cure Franzis of his affliction. Now, to be fair, the film's director Robert Wiene does a solid job of selling all this with the appropriate degree of menace, and so the Asylum Director's observation "So he thinks I'm Caligari. Now I know exactly how to cure him" does not come off as reassuring at all. But even so, it dilutes the impact of the film's message. Then again, having it all be the delusions of a madman was probably a pretty novel twist in 1920, and it manages to maintain the dark and pessimistic tone of the film. I can only be grateful that some bullshit happy ending wasn't forced in instead. Having your hero buckled into a straight jacked and locked away by the man he's convinced is his tormentor is still really fucking dark. 

And really, this whole movie is really fucking dark. Admirably so. The whole feel of this film is one of moody, oppressive weirdness. It's also refreshingly short, which means that there's no room for the tired soap-opera subplots that so many modern films feel obligated to include in the name of "character development". The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is a dark and direct parable, and even over a century later it still packs one hell of a punch. It's not a perfect movie, and some of its excesses have aged better than others, but there's a reason it's still considered a classic and is, for a silent film at least, still widely available and widely seen.