Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari

Francis and his friend Alan live in the small German town of Holstenwall. A traveling carnival arrives, and with it Dr. Caligari — an eccentric showman who exhibits Cesare, a pale, gaunt somnambulist he claims has been in a death-like sleep for twenty-three years and who, when briefly awakened, can answer any question about the future. At the exhibit, Alan asks Cesare how long he will live. Cesare answers: until dawn. That night, Alan is murdered in his bed.

Francis suspects Caligari and reports to the police. More murders follow. Jane — Francis's love interest — is abducted from her home by a figure in black. When police investigate Caligari's wagon, they find a lifelike dummy in Cesare's cabinet: Cesare was not sleeping there at all. Francis follows Caligari to a lunatic asylum, where he discovers that Caligari is the institution's director. In the asylum's records he finds an 18th-century account of a mystic named Caligari who used a somnambulist to commit murders — and evidence that the director has become obsessed with repeating the experiment.

Cesare, meanwhile, has abducted Jane but collapses and dies from exhaustion before harming her. His death breaks whatever hold the doctor had over him. Confronted with evidence of his crimes, Caligari goes berserk and is restrained by his own orderlies and committed to a cell.

Then the film reveals its frame. This entire story has been Francis's account — and we are now in the present, in the asylum itself. Francis, Cesare, and Jane are all patients there. The "Dr. Caligari" Francis has been describing is the asylum's actual director: a gentle, reasonable man who, having heard Francis's delusion in full, believes he finally understands his patient's madness and can treat it. The film ends with Francis strapped to a chair in a cell, and Caligari standing over him with the serene certainty of a man who has everything under control.