3 out of 5

Directed by: Fritz Lang

A prototype of the trite ‘love saves the day’ setup, given visual zip by iconic director Fritz Lang, who brings a touch of gothic to things with his looming representation of death and surrealist afterworld.

Destiny is a “song in six verses,” with verses 3-5 doing the anthology jig by representing three tales of lovers wrest apart by death, in which the male and female consorts are portrayed by the same two actors.  This is an extension of the framing plot, in which Death challenges a recently widowed lass (Lil Dagover) to save one of the couples in the three featured tales in exchange for her husband being brought back to life.  Adding some life to this mix is Lang’s (and actor Bernhard Goetze’s) take on Death: not as a trickster, taking pleasure in his life-taking, but as a haunted man exhausted by his tasks, hoping our leading lady can succeed in his challenge and he thus not have to bear the burden of taking so many souls.  The haunting set of a walled off afterlife and candle-lit hall representing soon-to-flicker-out souls is appropriately dreary, with Death’s ghastly makeup and expressively dour expression selling his sorrow.  There’s also some interesting moral quandaries for the time, with Dagover later offered the option of bargaining a living soul for hubby; that is, get someone else to take his dead place.

This all boils down to that rather trite, aforementioned trope: love saves the world and la dee da, so beyond Lang’s competence with storytelling, there’s not wholly too much to the movie.  It’s also tonally a bit uneven, with one of the vignettes veering into comedy, whereas the other two remain rather grim.  That aside, and besides the historical importance of Lang’s body of work, there’s some impressively staged action and special effects to behold.

The restoration showing on Netflix is very crisp, with a lively score that helps to keep those with silent-movie ADD invested.