M

The oldest language for what afflicts Beckert is possession. He describes an inner drive that is not him and will not be reasoned with: "Always there is this evil force inside me. It is there all the time, driving me out to wander the streets, following me, silently, but I can feel it there. It is myself pursuing myself." He whistles Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" only when the compulsion takes him, so that the tune becomes the audible signature of the thing that rides him. A blind balloon-seller recognizes the melody and marks him, and the letter M is chalked onto his coat from behind. He is branded by the sound the demon makes.

This is the demonological structure exactly: an agency inside the person that seizes control, announces itself through a repeated sign, and can be identified by that sign though the host cannot see it on his own back. Beckert is not defending murder. He is testifying to bondage, describing an occupant. The film refuses to tell you whether that occupant excuses him.

Lang shoots the city and the underworld as mirror images. Police and criminals hold parallel meetings, filmed with matching compositions, both hunting the same prey, both organized, both certain of their own legitimacy. Beckert becomes the collective shadow: the one figure onto whom an entire anxious society can load its darkness so that everyone else may feel clean. The mob that judges him is composed of thieves and murderers who have simply drawn a line beneath their own crimes and above his.

The film's final image is the deepest cut. As the mob prepares to lynch him, the real police break in, and a mother says to the camera, "This won't bring back our children. We too should keep a closer watch on our children." The shadow cannot be resolved by execution. Watchfulness turned inward is the only response the film will endorse, because the darkness was never contained in one marked coat.