“M” is a chilling movie that once again proves foreshadowing and not showing a villain up front, when executed flawlessly, works better than any cheap scares and a revealed villain ever could.

Set in 1930s Berlin, the film opens by clearly establishing its tone in a scene that still holds up by today’s standards. A man, whose front we do not see, is shown purchasing a little girl a balloon from a blind man. The next scene shows the girls mother frantically looking for her daughter as a balloon floats behind her and eventually gets entangled in telephone lines in one of cinema’s most chilling sequences.

Thus begins an extensive investigation by the police to find the girl and what is eventually revealed to be a serial killer and implied pedophile. The extensive pursuit leads to difficulty for the criminal underworld of mobsters and crooks. With the heightened police activity in the city, the find it difficult to get their business done, thus leading a large number of them to band together to catch the serial killer themselves

The film poses the viewer with interesting dilemmas and moral and ethical questions. Despite the fact that the audience knows the mobsters are bad people, its interesting to find how appealing they are when they are chasing someone whose crime is considered to be worse than the ones they commit. The villains in everyday life become the film’s protagonists, and it’s an interesting scenario to take a look at once the film is through. Knowing the police investigation won’t be a quick one, nor a just one at that, also throws a wrench into determining what is right and wrong in terms of the film’s situation.

The film is virtually flawless, its only downfall being that it was director Fritz Lang’s first sound film. It is clear through watching the film that at the time he didn’t have a firm grasp on transitioning from silent to sound films. But hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to see too that Lang’s confidence with silent movies allowed him to make a creepier, eerier and much more intense film than a film director who understood sound film making could have done at the time.

“M” still holds up especially well today, not only because of its production value but also because the questions it poses and the messages it sends still resonate today. Criminal activity and condemnation haven’t gone away since the film was made in 1931, and as a result everything still seems to be relevant just as much today as it was back then. Perhaps Lang lucked out with the German film being followed by an unfortunate history, but even without it, the film still would have been remarkably great.