A 39-minute French fever dream where family gaslighting meets legal fraud — and it predates film noir by a decade.
A man who suffers from the delirium of persecution and to the point of trying to strangle his wife is interned. His brother, needing his signature for his own business, gets him out of the asylum with the complicity of a false magistrate and against the advice of the doctor.
Direction
Tourneur packs a feature's worth of dread into 39 minutes.
Acting
Vanel's trembling persecution complex is genuinely disturbing.
Cinematography
Expressionist shadows that would make German filmmakers jealous.
Director
Maurice Tourneur
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Made during France's interwar anxiety about mental health institutions, reflecting widespread distrust of medical and legal authority.
Tourneur shot this between Hollywood successes — his return to French cinema shows American studio precision colliding with European moral rot.
FR
