“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” must have been a solid ten out of five stars when it came out a century ago, and it still holds decently nowadays despite dragging a little in the pacing. Sketchy and naive as it may look now, the plot anticipated countless cliches of modern cinema, and even has one of the first twist endings in history (a rather useless one to be honest, but we appreciate the effort).

The art direction is what makes the film so fascinating: the bizarre set designs with distorted architecture to emphasize the feeling of the characters, the unnatural acting excessive makeup, the lights and shadows directly painted on the backgrounds, all elements of expressionist theatre that find one of their first cinematic incarnations here. Responsible for most of Tim Burton’s aesthetic cliches.

Just make sure to buy a decent reissue, though. I first watched it on Japanese Amazon, but the video quality was so bad that the sets lost so much depth and detail to the point that I could barely understand what was going on. It also came with a random score that killed the atmosphere. There are a couple of legit 4k restoration reissues available now, with decent scores and even the original intertitle graphics if you want to check it out at its best.