Geheimnisse Einer Seele, or Secrets Of A Soul (1926)

Trippy

Directed by G.W. Pabst

Starring Werner Krauss, Ruth Weyher and Ilka Grüning

Produced by Neumann-Filmproduktion



An apartment.  A husband and wife have a normal everyday conversation.  He is shaving, she asks if he can trim some of the hair from the back of her neck.  As the razor goes to make its first cut, a cry of "Murder!" is heard outside the window.  It seems a neighbor has been killed during the night.  The startled man looks down and sees he has left a small, superficial wound on his wife's neck.  It's an accident, so no big deal.



Or so you would think.



The husband named Martin soon begins having strange dreams.  He is flying and a man in a tree shoots him out of the sky.  A city pops up on a hillside as though made of cardboard.  A bell tower spirals from the ground adorned with three ringing bells made of women's faces.



That's not all.  He develops a fear of knives.  The phobia is so bad, he cannot even go to the barber for a shave, let alone wield a razor himself.  What's worse?  He has an urge to kill his wife.  



Will Martin give into his psychosis and bloodlust? Or will he... wait a minute... what's this?  Oh, he met a psychoanalyst who takes Martin under his care for several months, divining the source of his phobias and urges and curing him.  The end.



Huh?



Did that just happen?



Did a movie that could have been about a murder mystery or a protagonist's slow descent into madness really just turn into a high school science reel titled "Psychoanalysis and You"?



Wow... just... wow.



Secrets of a Soul does a fair job early on of building a sense of foreboding with Martin's behavior.  The dream sequence is a visual treat, appropriately surrealistic and unsettling, the true stuff of nightmares.  You feel him cracking and you are waiting for either him to snap or even for him to take an interest in the murder in some way.



Of course, neither of those things happened.  We are told in a quick exchange that the murderer has been caught.  And Martin bumps into a psychoanalyst who starts walking him through his phobias and dreams.  The dissection becomes clinical and staid with the actors confined to a room talking to each other.  



It's too bad because Pabst clearly has a flair for the visual medium.  The opening shot of Martin shaving his wife knows just when to punctuate a mundane scene with a closeup to build a sense of dread.  The dream sequence and his childhood memories feel like dreams and memories.  It's a shame it's all in support of an infomercial for psychology.



While watching Secrets of a Soul, my mind wandered to all of the more interesting places the movie could have gone.  It becomes boring and monotonous in a way that makes you imagine the better unmade films this could have been.  It's an infomercial with a beautiful dream sequence in the middle.  Do yourself a favor: seek out the dream sequence and skip the rest.



*1/2 out of *****