Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920) Movie Review

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, also known as Das Cabinet Des Dr. Caligari (1920), is a German silent horror film, directed by Robert Wiene and written by Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer. The Film tells the story a hypnotist who uses a somnambulist, a sleep walker, to commit murders. The contorted sets, contrasting areas of light and dark lighting, and unique set design all feed into the films story within a story narrative. The use of the angular buildings within the city fuel the idea that the story is an expression of a lunatic’s perception of his own reality in which nothing that he is telling us is in fact true but rather a figment of his imagination.

If we at look at what we believe to be the main antagonist; Dr. Caligari we can see major changes in his character progression near the end of the film starting of as a sideshow hypnotist. Caligari then goes to an insane asylum director trying to replicate the experiments of an 18th century mystic named Caligari to a madman who must be made a prisoner in his own asylum whose patient turns out to be the madman who has been telling the story.

If we now go further into detail on this statement here starting with the fact that the whole film is being told from the viewpoint of a lunatic in an asylum run by Dr. Caligari I come to the realisation that beginning with the first appearance of Dr. Caligari in the lunatic’s reality as the hypnotist one gets that sense that this gives us an indication that the storyteller sees Dr. Caligari as someone who manipulates and controls people both in his perceived reality and the actual reality, whether this be true or not. Moving onto the next perception of Dr. Caligari, the insane asylum director, one gets the sense that he is trying to be implicated as this evil person set to recreate an experiment in order to carry out wicked demands that he himself wishes not to do. Looking at this we could potentially see that this might stem off from treatment that the lunatic has received from Dr. Caligari and maybe due to the harsh nature of such treatment he now perceives Caligari as insane and evil, which then leads into the next idea that Caligari becomes a madman who needs to be the patient. This is sometime seen in films that portray insane asylums in which the patient or even patients do not seem themselves as ill but rather those trying to help them. The idea being that those who are ‘hurting’ them with treatment but in reality that ‘hurting’ is just treatment in attempts to help those recover.

In conclusion to this statement it comes back to the main protagonist who is telling us this story who ends up being a lunatic in an insane asylum feeding us, the audience, with his delusions making us feel at first for the vast majority of the film that Dr. Caligari is this wicked evil figure who has set out this sleepwalker that he has manipulated to kill people so that he himself does not need to dirty his own hands. However, in reality this is not the case and is in fact just the ranting of an insane man.