Summary
A sepulchral fever-dream excavated from 1918 Berlin, Die Tophar-Mumie unwraps its celluloid bandages inside a gas-lit museum where the air itself seems pickled in formaldehyde. The collector Tophar—part Schliemann, part Mephistopheles—unseals a sarcophagus dredged from the Nile’s black silt; inside lies not a king but a woman whose eyelids flicker open like moth-wings, releasing a whiplash of erotic dread across the waxed parquet. From that first crack of ancient cedar the film abandons chronology, drifting instead through corridors of obsidian mirrors, opium smoke, and gramophone static. Hofbauer’s gaunt archaeologist, Klein’s decadent heir, and Bargi’s resurrected priestess form a scalene love-triangle whose hypotenuse is death itself. Every intertitle arrives like a telegram from the underworld: “The soul remembers what the sand forgot.” Shadows are painted directly onto the negative, so characters seem to peel away from their own silhouettes; in one shot the mummy’s linen unwraps backward, re-winding centuries in a single breath, exposing skin that glows like phosphorus. The climax—an unholy baptism in the Spree River at dawn—fuses German Expressionism with pagan ritual: the priestess sinks beneath algae while Tophar, arms outstretched, becomes both crucifix and anchor. No resurrection, only transubstantiation: the film ends on a freeze-frame of ripples that refuse to close, as though history itself had been stunned mid-gesture.
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