The Hands of Orlac

The Hands of Orlac (1924), aka Orlacs Hände, directed by Robert Wiene, restored and remastered, encoded in 10 bit HEVC with AAC sound, including stereo score, commentary track, and English subtitles.

IMDb : https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0015202/

Video encoded in two-pass 8 200 kbps x265 10bit with the veryslow preset for archive quality image.

English subtitles OCRed, proofed and corrected.

Note : Robert Wiene, most known for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directing Conrad Veidt again? This has to be a slam dunk silent horror, right? Well, not quite, since the premise is mostly psychological, and so we're treated to an hour and a half of Veidt freaking the fuck out at very little again and again, but it's still very worth seeing, especially since it's probably the first horror movie to feature the "transplanted organ from a murderer makes the recipient want to kill" motif, which later popped up in a lot of stuff, including the Mark Hamill segment of Body Bags.

Veidt's character, concert pianist Paul Orlac, injures his hands in a train accident, and receives transplanted hands from an executed murderer, which leads to weird dreams, a dagger mysteriously appearing in his home, and him being stalked by a strange man. However, all is not how it seems, and while the final twist is not terribly exciting, it's at least a bit unexpected. Also, the production design is interesting, mixing expressionism with more naturalistic sets, and placing the characters, especially Orlac, in vast, sparse spaces suggesting isolation.

Again a fairly conservative restoration, this time by the Austrian Film Archive, with quite variable quality, but it's pretty decent all in all. The contemporary classical score by Johannes Kalitzke is not my cup of tea, but it's the only game in town on this release. Maybe just go with the commentary track, which is informative and interesting.

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