M

Fritz Lang's M, from 1931, still feels like a trap slowly closing. A child murderer is loose in a German city, and the police cannot catch him. The strange, brilliant part of the setup is that the manhunt pulls in the criminal underworld too, so for long stretches you are watching criminals do detective work alongside the state. As the hunt tightens, you stop being able to say which side is administering justice and which is just hunting. Peter Lorre plays the killer, and the role made his career for a reason. He is pathetic and terrifying at once. Otto Wernicke, Inge Landgut, and Ellen Widmann keep the film anchored in ordinary fear, and fear is the real subject here: what a whole city does with it, how fast it curdles into something uglier than the crime. Lang shoots it all with a starkness that makes the score feel like another character, and crime thrillers have been borrowing from the result ever since.

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