Tonight the projector hums like a tired cicada, and on the wall – shadows twist themselves into The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The film is over a century old now, yet it feels more alive than most things that breathe. Angles warp, streets curl like paper, and faces flicker between terror and trance. Everything looks as if it’s been drawn by a feverish hand that didn’t want to sleep.

Caligari, the carnival hypnotist, is a figure stitched from nightmares and theater curtains. His somnambulist, Cesare, drifts through painted alleys with eyes that know too much. You can almost feel the dust of 1920 Germany clinging to the frame – fear, guilt, and the weight of dreams gone wrong. It’s a horror film made before the word “horror” knew what it was.

What I love most is how unreal everything is, and how that unreality tells the truth. The crooked sets, the shadows shaped like claws, the distorted perspective – all of it feels like a map of the inside of a frightened mind. You can trace the lines of postwar despair in every corner. The monsters here are not supernatural; they are people who sleepwalk through authority and obedience.

Watching it now, you realize how quiet it all is. No screaming, no chase music – just painted dread. Cesare’s slow walk through the night feels like watching your own heartbeat creep away from you. And that twist ending, still sharp after all these years, whispers that madness might just be the truest storyteller of all.

Afterward I turned off the light and the room seemed wrong, tilted somehow. The lamp’s shadow bent the wall like it wanted to crawl inside. Maybe that’s Caligari’s trick – once you’ve seen his world, you start noticing how crooked your own furniture looks.

A masterpiece of dreams gone sour, a fairy tale that forgot to wake up. If you listen closely, even now, you can hear Cesare breathing behind the curtain.

(★★★★★)