Murnau succeeded in blending his several sides in this fascinating film which weaves an atmosphere of anguished oppression into an old-dark-castle intrigue of death and deception, even punctuated with spurts of comic relief. It is autumn; at the Castle Vogelod, guests gather for a hunting vacation. Among them is the beautiful Baroness von Safferstadt, whose first husband died years ago under suspicious circumstances, perhaps implicating his own brother, perhaps the Baroness herself.... Murnau captures, as few other filmmakers have, the torturous hold such an unsolved mystery has on its protagonists as the retreat turns into a series of eerily staged confessionals. As always, the Murnau team (writer Carl Mayer, designer Hermann Warm and cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner) create moods purely cinematically, from the faint smoke which rises from the chairs as people sit down, to the luminous natural imagery, to the magnificent set pieces of the confessions. Critic Willy Haas in 1921 noted “Murnau's artistic tendency to moderate strong gestures into others more noble and subtle...conveying intimate dialogue, the completely silent exchanges of the heart, as in the scene of the confession, where the emotion is expressed through the extraordinary tension of the bodies.”