Plot
Motorist Jane Lindstrom has a blowout and seeks assistance at an estate owned by Caligari, a very polite man with a German accent. After spending the night she finds that Caligari will not let her leave; he proceeds to ask some personal questions and shows her disgusting pictures.
Prevented by guards from leaving, and unable to telephone, Jane seeks allies among the other guests but finds only three possible candidates: the older Paul, the younger Mark (for whom she has romantic desires), and a lively elderly woman named Ruth. After seeing Ruth tortured, Jane goes to Paul who convinces her to confront Caligari. Jane does so and tries to seduce him, as she suspects he has been spying on her in the bath. After that fails, Caligari reveals that he and Paul and are one and the same person and Jane runs down a corridor of wildly shifting imagery that acts as a transition.
Finally it is revealed that Jane is a mental patient and everything the audience has seen up to this point has been her distortion of the institute she was in: the personal questions were psychoanalysis, the disgusting pictures were Rorschach cards, Ruth's torture was shock treatment, and even Caligari's coat of arms was a distorted version of the medical caduceus symbol. Cured, Jane is taken from the asylum by Mark, now revealed to be her son; and then we see Jane's face. She now has many wrinkles implying that she is far older than the smooth-skinned woman we have seen through most of the film.
A sample of dialog regarding sexual intercourse from the film was later sampled by Nine Inch Nails on their cover of "Get Down, Make Love" by Queen.
Read more about this topic: The Cabinet Of Caligari
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“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
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Aspire, astound, establish or estrange.”
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)