Panique (1946)

15 September 2019

There are a lot of films from the 30s-40s about mob justice, and those movies centered around groupthink make me very uneasy - I think because after so many decades you think we'd know better. M (1931, 10/10) is about a serial killer that evaded the police so the criminal underground searched for him instead. Tonight I watched Panique (1946), a french film where paranoia consumes a small village so much that it puts the life of an innocent man at risk.

This film depressed me greatly, because it's easy to see this story applied to current day. A woman is murdered, and the townsfolk eventually focus on a resident solely out of fear and subterfuge. at 99m it gives enough of the main characters to help you really feel their pain as the story progresses.

Some of the story's actions don't strictly follow justice here, but ultimately that's kinda the point of this story. There's enough intolerance and hate building to a point where rules and laws are cast aside, and those little cheats cascade into fear and death. 9/10