M

German director Fritz Lang’s devastating 1931 serial killer template-setter has lost none of its radical, gripping power and intensity more than eight decades on. As much about mob justice and human weakness as it is about the murder of a child, ‘M’ unnervingly predicts the country’s impending downfall.

Peter Lorre plays Hans Beckert, a mentally-disturbed predator who becomes the target of a feverish, citywide vigilante manhunt. The result is one of cinema’s most convincing portraits of a sick society, in which the hapless Beckert is less an aberration, more the inevitable, even pitiable, end product. One can only imagine the ripples of unease it must have caused in an economically-ravaged nation teetering on the brink of totalitarian meltdown.