Shadows and Fog

Shadows and Fog (1991) is a black-and-white crime comedy you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Woody Allen, who also stars. A strangler is loose in an unnamed European town and a hapless bookkeeper is dragged out of bed in the middle of the night to join the vigilante manhunt — except no one will tell him what his role in the plan actually is.

The cast reads like a roll call: Mia Farrow, John Malkovich, Jodie Foster, Madonna, Kathy Bates, John Cusack — each drifting through the fog for a scene or two, adding their own strand of the absurd. Allen shot it entirely on studio sets, openly artificial: slick cobblestones, hard shadows, no pretense of naturalism. The debt to German Expressionism and to Kafka is upfront. A small man is summoned by a system that demands his compliance but never explains its logic. It sits apart from the rest of his filmography — darker in look, drier in comedy — and works best for viewers who already know their Fritz Lang. Watch Shadows and Fog (1991) online on iFILM.