Destiny

Destiny (Der müde Tod, 1921) is a German silent fantasy you can watch online on iFILM. Fritz Lang directed it at the peak of Expressionism: a young woman (Lil Dagover) watches her lover vanish into the company of a gaunt stranger who has just bought a house at the edge of the cemetery. That stranger is Death.

Death (Bernhard Goetzke) makes an offer: watch three tales play out — one in Persia, one in Renaissance Venice, one in imperial China — and if a single soul can be saved from any of them, the lover returns. None of the three go as hoped. Walter Janssen plays the young man across all incarnations.

Lang called it the turning point of his career, and the evidence followed: Buñuel screened it repeatedly; Hitchcock absorbed its visual grammar. Douglas Fairbanks reportedly acquired the American rights purely to suppress a remake. Watch Destiny (1921) online on iFILM.