Film

The Tower of Lies

Name: The Tower of Lies
Genre: Drama
Released: 1925
Cast: Norma Shearer, Lon Chaney, Ian Keith, Claire McDowell, William Haines

Drama
Very dark

A 1925 silent drama about an aging farmer's descent into delusion when his daughter leaves for the city to settle his debts. Norma Shearer and Lon Chaney anchor this psychological study of parental obsession, poverty, and the stories we tell ourselves. It's intimate and claustrophobic—the kind of film that reminds you why silent cinema could devastate an audience.

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Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl1919

Griffith's masterpiece about isolation and obsession, with Lillian Gish giving one of cinema's most vulnerable performances. A direct ancestor to the psychological intensity Chaney brings here.

But It's slow by modern standards, and the sentimentality can feel suffocating if you're not in the mood for profound sadness.

Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl poster

The Passion of Joan of Arc1928

Renée Jeanne Falconetti's face in extreme close-up, registering every shade of faith, doubt, and terror. A film about inner torment made visible through performance alone—what silent cinema did better than anything.

But The handheld camerawork and repetitive editing are deliberately disorienting. Some find it avant-garde to the point of numbness.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans1927

Murnau's visual poetry about temptation, guilt, and redemption. Technically dazzling and emotionally precise—the city sequences are hallucinatory, the countryside scenes achingly real.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Ashes of Vengeance1923

Both track a protagonist's descent into psychological delusion rooted in loss and poverty. Both use the female figure (living or dead) as the anchor of a man's refusal to accept reality.

A Polish film about a man obsessed with his dead wife, unable to let go or move forward. Like *The Tower of Lies*, it's a study of how the mind manufactures a story to avoid reality—but it goes further into surrealism and fever dream.

But It's extremely difficult to find, deliberately obscure in structure, and the obsession with the dead woman borders on necrophilia. Not an easy sit.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame1923

Lon Chaney's most celebrated role: a performance of such physicality and pathos that it justifies the entire melodramatic apparatus around it. The sets are monumental, the sentiment earned.

But It's Chaney at his most grotesque, and the romance subplot is conventionally written. The film is really about one man's impossible love, which can feel claustrophobic.

The Last Laugh1924

Murnau again, this time using camera movement instead of cuts to tell a story of shame and humiliation. A minor man in a minor job, his entire sense of self destroyed. It's about the stories we believe about ourselves.

But There is almost no plot. If you need narrative momentum, this will feel like watching someone's anxiety dream in real time.

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages1916

Griffith's most ambitious film: four stories across four eras, all building toward a meditation on how fear and prejudice repeat. Formally experimental, morally urgent, visually overwhelming.

But It's three and a half hours, structurally complex, and Griffith's politics are repugnant. You have to want to wrestle with it.

Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages poster

The Phantom Carriage1921

A Swedish masterpiece about guilt and redemption, shot in luminous black and white. A man sees his own death and is given a chance to reckon with how he's lived. It's ghost story and spiritual reckoning combined.

But The pacing is glacial and the moral lessons are stated plainly. Subtlety isn't the point, which will frustrate anyone looking for ambiguity.

Nosferatu1922

Murnau's vampire film is formally brilliant and genuinely eerie. But it's also about plague, poverty, and how communities blame outsiders for their suffering. The horror is social as much as supernatural.

But It's atmospheric rather than scary by modern standards, and the plot is simple. If you need action or sustained terror, it will feel like a slow crawl.

The Scarlet Letter1927

Lillian Gish in Hawthorne, with all the psychological intensity the source material demands. A film about shame, judgment, and the gap between public reputation and inner truth.

But It's a faithful adaptation of a novel that people find tedious. If you found the book punishing, this won't change your mind.

Greed1924

Both are American silent films of the 1920s that treat poverty and obsession as forms of madness. Both reject the sentiment that the working poor are noble—they're trapped, and the trap warps them.

Erich von Stroheim's ten-hour masterpiece about how money poisons everything, told with unflinching naturalism. It's the opposite register from *Tower of Lies*—baroque, violent, grotesque rather than intimate—but it's about the same moral rot.

But Only a fragment survives, severely cut. Watching it is arduous by design. Von Stroheim wanted you to feel degraded by what you were seeing.

The Goat1921

Keaton's protagonist spirals into a world where perception and reality have divorced—like the farmer's descent. But Keaton mines it for comedy rather than tragedy, showing how the same structure can be either.

Buster Keaton in perhaps his most deranged short: a man is mistaken for a criminal and the entire world turns on him, rationally and inexplicably. It's absurdist comedy, but the paranoia is real and escalating.

But It's seven minutes of relentless bad luck presented as slapstick. If you need character development or emotional stakes, the joke will feel thin and repetitive.