M

A simple, haunting musical phrase whistled offscreen tells us that a young girl will be killed. “Who Is the Murderer?” pleads a nearby placard as serial killer Hans Beckert (Peter Lorre) closes in on little Elsie Beckmann . . . In his harrowing masterwork M, Fritz Lang merges trenchant social commentary with chilling suspense, creating a panorama of private madness and public hysteria that to this day remains the blueprint for the psychological thriller.

There is nothing tentative in M: not the use of sound to expand the visible frame, nor the implied links between mass culture and mass murder, nor the canny deployment of the serial killer story to reveal the organizing structures of a world in which, as Anton Kaes puts it, “nothing is left to chance but death.” Embodied with an uncanny and twitching malaise by Brecht actor Peter Lorre, the child murderer is himself childish: a whistling flaneur who seems less a Mabusian master of destinies than a slave to his own dark impulses. For much of the film he is a cipher for the dual investigations of police and criminals, their respective regimes of detection and surveillance converging in a darkly prescient picture of a law beyond the law.