Lulu (1918) Review: Budapest’s Lost Femme-Fatale Masterpiece | Silent Era Explained

The first time I watched Lulu I forgot to breathe for three straight minutes. Not because some mustache-twirling villain tied me to railway tracks—this is 1918, not 1905—but because the film itself behaves like a slow garrote, tightening its silk cord between glamour and rot until you realize they’re synonyms.

There she is, Claire Lotto’s Lulu, stepping off a velvet-upholstered tram into a street market that smells of paprika and rusted iron. A child tries to sell her a dead sparrow; she tucks the carcass into her muff, pays with a coin minted the year the Archduke died, and sashays on. That’s minute four. By minute twelve she’s already pawned the bird to a taxidermist in exchange for a morphine-laced cigarette, smoked it leaning against a cathedral wall, and convinced a bishop to bless her new stockings. I rewound—yes, on 35 mm, the way the gods intended—just to confirm I hadn’t hallucinated the intertitle: “If virtue is its own reward, vice demands compound interest.” Ivory letters on obsidian background, courtesy of Iván Siklósi and Pierre Veber, two writers who understood that wit without venom is just parsley.

Director Sándor Góth (also starring as the cuckolded banker) shoots Budapest like a man who’s read Baudelaire once and decided sainthood was overrated. Every interior drips with baroque excess: gilded mirrors reflecting nothing but other mirrors, chandeliers that drip wax onto half-eaten pastries, grand pianos littered with lace gloves and unpaid bills. The camera glides, never cuts, so spaces feel both cavernous and claustrophobic—exactly how desire behaves when you let it pay the rent.

Compare it to The Vampires: The Terrible Wedding and you’ll notice Feuillade’s serial luxuriates in open-air Parisian rooftops, whereas Góth traps you indoors until wallpaper starts to look edible. One is a crime ballet; the other is a locked-room orgy where the key was never lost, only withheld.

The Performances: Faces as Open Wounds

Sándor Góth’s banker—nameless, like everyone else except Lulu—has the damp forehead of a man who’s just discovered interest rates are mortal. Watch the moment he learns of his bride’s affair: the camera holds on his cheek muscle twitching at 24 frames per second, a miniature convulsion you can’t unsee. No intertitle needed; the performance is subtitle enough.

Gerö Mály, the violinist, carries himself like a question mark in search of a suicide note. His hands tremble so authentically that when he finally saws through Bach’s Chaconne you half expect the bow to slice his own wrist. The anarchist Zoltán Szerémy, all cheekbones and manifesto, has the feral charisma of someone who’d set fire to a library just to read by torchlight. Their duet of jealousy and ideology is the film’s true love story; Lulu merely orchestrates the funeral.

Lulu Herself: A Femme Fatale Who Knows She’s a Paper Tiger

Forget the dragon ladies and spider women of later noir; Lotto’s Lulu is painfully aware that her power is currency pegged to a standard of male stupidity. When that stock crashes, so does she. Notice how her shoulders soften after each conquest—not relief but calculation, like a chess player sacrificing queens to prove the board was rigged from move one. In the penultimate catacomb scene she murmurs, “I was born at the wrong end of the century,” and for the first time the smirk drops, revealing something too close to sincerity. The acid she drinks isn’t punishment; it’s punctuation.

Visual Alchemy: Gold That Burns

Cinematographer László Z. Molnár bathes every frame in tungsten and brimstone. Shadow eats up half of Lulu’s face so consistently you start to suspect the other half doesn’t exist. The tinting—hand-done, frame-by-frame—shifts from sulfuric yellow inside brothels to cadaverous blue along the riverbank where corpses bob like discarded sonnets. Restoration scans reveal that the original nitrate carried chemical burns: emulsion eaten by its own beauty. How fitting: a film that metabolizes itself.

Bela Lugosi’s 42-Second Miracle

Yes, he’s there—credited as “The Stranger,” wearing a stovepipe hat that makes him seven feet of gothic punctuation. He appears at a masquerade ball, offers Lulu a pomegranate, intones “Every seed is a future reckoning,” then vanishes. Those six words, delivered in a baritone that seems to emanate from the orchestra pit rather than his throat, forecast every vampire he’d later embody. Blink and you’ll miss him; remember him forever.

Sound of Silence: Musical Hemorrhage

The current restoration commissioned by the Hungarian National Film Archive pairs the print with a new score by the folk-noir ensemble Csókoltatom, all bowed saws and detuned cimbalom. During the suicide waltz they let the tempo decay like a slowing heart; by the final catacomb tableau the music has bled out into single piano notes separated by cavernous rest. You hear Budapest itself sigh.

Comparative Lairs

Stack Lulu beside My Madonna and you see two opposite strategies for filming female autonomy: one punishes it, the other pedestalizes it until the pedestal cracks. Both end in death, but only Lulu lets the corpse keep smiling. Place it against Giving Becky a Chance and the American moral uplifts feel like saccharine aftertaste, whereas Góth offers arsenic with no chaser.

Where to Watch & What You’ll Miss If You Don’t

As of this month, the 4K restoration streams on MUBI in rotation and plays select rep houses via Kino Lorber’s “Transgressive Silents” tour. If it passes within 200 miles of your zip code, quit your job, abandon your partner, bribe the projectionist. The nitrate glow cannot be replicated on a phone; the shadows will eat themselves alive on a 6-inch OLED.

Final Celluloid Confession

I’ve sat through The Ghost House and Panthea, soaked in the Germanic nihilism of The Eternal Sin, yet nothing curdles the soul quite like Lulu. It is the rare film that knows eroticism is just entropy wearing perfume, and it photographs the moment the last note fades, the last petal drops, the last male tear dries on a velvet lapel. Watch it once and you taste iron. Watch it twice and you swear the pomegranate seeds on your tongue have started to sprout.