Phantom

Phantom (1922) — watch online on iFILM — is F.W. Murnau's silent German drama about a life derailed by a single instant. Lorenz Lubota is a city clerk going nowhere in particular. A carriage knocks him down; the woman driving it barely glances back. He is immediately, hopelessly fixated.

The film is told as a retrospective — an elderly Lorenz looking back at the wreckage of his younger self — which gives the whole thing a wistful, regret-edged quality rather than a romantic glow. Alfred Abel plays Lorenz with quiet gravity; Lil Dagover and Lya de Putti circle his obsession as figures of temptation and steadiness. This is Murnau reading infatuation as a kind of slow disaster, years before Nosferatu brought him wider attention. Stream Phantom (1922) on iFILM.