Synopsis: M is the story of a German city that is overrun with the presence of an unknown serial child murderer. Families are terrified, police are overworked, and crime syndicates are tired of their illegitimate operations being highlighted in the coppers’ search to unearth this sicko. Due to this, the crime lords decide to take matters into their own hands and find the murderer themselves. They are eventually successful and hold their own sort of trial in which the judge, jury, prosecutor, and defense are made up of other criminals. This trial is cut short right after a pretty intense monologue from Mr. Child Murderer when the police show up and take him into custody. Interestingly, the final scene of the film occurs right after this and only shows the actual trial being set up and the mother of one of the deceased children giving the call to action of “protect our children” to the audience.

We’re starting off the list with M, a German crime thriller from the 1930s. I mentioned this in the opening blog post, but I was not expecting great things from this. It’s almost 100 years old, in German, in black and white, about a child murderer – none of these things get my fire stoked if you know what I mean. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I was not only able to sit through it, but kinda enjoy it the whole time as well. Before this movie, the oldest piece of cinema I had seen was 12 Angry Men (don’t get me wrong this is a banger, but still, these movies are so fuckin old) and even 12 Angry Men is like 30 years newer than M. So, I was all the more surprised when I was pretty captivated throughout the whole viewing experience.

The first thing I noticed when watching M was how much of the story is shown rather than told. I kept finding myself being surprised when information that was important to the story wasn’t explicitly told to the audience – something I’ve always disliked about many modern movies. M doesn’t assume the audience is stupid. Things are left up to interpretation and can be puzzled together through careful watching. Another point on the filmmaking that I noticed was how much they employed the use of still shots, that is, how often there was a shot of like a kitchen table and nothing else going on. In fact, at the the beginning of the film, there was a series of around 5 shots that were just empty rooms around some person’s apartment building. This is something that almost never happens in modern film aside from artsy fartsy movies and I’m not really sure how I feel about it. There’s also this weird scene in the homicide inspector’s office where the camera is positioned underneath the inspector’s desk and you get a solid view of this guy’s cock and balls through his pants for what felt like 10 minutes but was probably closer to 1. The amount of visual storytelling is pretty cool though and in my opinion, affects the score in a good way.

Another thing I noticed is that people kind of sucked at acting 100 years ago. That isn’t to say that there was a whole lot of bad acting, but I’d be pretty surprised if any of the actors in M would get any roles in today’s age aside from student films and high-quality pornos. Now that may read pretty harsh, but some of the reactions and moments of “acting” are almost laughably ridiculous. There’s a particular scene that comes to mind where the murderer is being shown pictures of his victims and after every picture, he has an even more ludicrous pose and facial expression than the last. If you asked a 2nd grader to put on their best shocked and sacred face, you’d get a pretty close approximation of the shit this guy was pulling. What’s interesting to me, however, is that the bad acting never really pulled me out of the story. I’m not sure if this is because my expectations were tempered, or maybe because everyone is kind of a shitty actor so individual performances aren’t vastly different, and there’s a weird sense of cohesive mid-ness that ties everything together. So while the acting isn’t doing my rating of M any favors, I’m not taking it too heavily into consideration.

Now onto the story itself. I thought it was pretty neat. M plays with the ideas of mob justice, sense of community, and compulsion as a mental disorder. The organization of the story is interesting as well as there’s only one scene where they delve into the murderer’s psyche, which happens right at the end during his “mock” trial. The angry mob is demanding that the murderer be put to death and is met with the argument that criminal compulsion should be met with treatment, not execution. It’s interesting that we currently have some pretty similar debates going on in the modern world and brings me to my next observation of the differences in time and culture.

This aspect of my viewing experience was most fascinating to me. Throughout watching I kept thinking to myself, “Man, I don’t know anything about 1930’s Germany – aside from nazis and stuff.” This gap in knowledge left me wondering if I was missing things that a viewer from the ’30s would have picked up on. For example, there’s a scene at the beginning of the movie where in the midst of murder hysteria a mother is concerned that her daughter hasn’t come home yet. The mother asks the mailman (book delivery guy?) if he’s seen her daughter and shouts down the stairwell of their apartment building calling her name. Is this a typical reaction of a German mother in the 30s? I have no idea; I was wondering this whole time whether this was a typical reaction, an underreaction, or even an overreaction. That was just an example, but there are many moments in the film that made me wonder what I was missing due to the significant culture and time gap.

In conclusion, I was pleasantly surprised with M. It’s probably never gonna be the subject of a rewatch but I’m glad I sat down and finished it. I’ll give it the following ratings:

Story 8/10, filmmaking 5/10, acting 4/10, Total 6.7/10.

*Side note: I’m not sure if I will be keeping this rating system or changing it in the future, I also am not going to be “adjusting for inflation.” That is to say, I’m not giving or taking away points based on when the movie was released. If the movie was awesome in the 20s but I think it sucks today, then it’s going to get a bad rating (looking at you Citizen Kane).