Robert Wiene s Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari is a truly weird movie, not in the sense of a tame unconventionality or a comfortable quirkiness, but in the sense of attempting to capture a piece of the deep, dark, eldritch world that lives within the psyche of every human being, especially children, manifesting itself in half-remembered nightmares, Grimm fairy tales, or the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. It is not a safe world, and that is its attraction. It is murky, mysterious, and potentially deadly.
Nothing is what it seems.
Walter Reimann and Walter R hrig and designer Hermann Warm, the whole of Caligari is told in a highly expressionistic style nearly completely uncharacteristic of anything before seen on film. Caligari is intended to throw the audience off-balance, to bring it into another world. It accomplishes this ably. This characteristic poses questions. Suddenly placing the character played by Krauss, whom we have come to see as utterly mad, back in charge of the asylum and bringing Cesare back to gentle life is enough of a twist that, no matter what particular plane of reality the story is supposed to be on, the same questions are raised, and even in much more unsettling, obscure ways.