After watching Jaws, we decided to make it a don’t-go-in-the-water two-fer, with this F.W. Murnau silent film about a man who doesn’t quite drown his wife. This is another one from the AFI list; I’d seen it before, but my wife hadn’t, and I was up for a rewatch.

When I watched it before, in 2016, it was when I was just beginning to go through the 2012 S&S Great Movies list, on which this was #5 (it’s dropped to #11 on the 2022 list). Since I’d already seen Vertigo and Citizen Kane, that meant Sunrise was only the third movie I watched as I started in on that project; I was curious as to how my reaction would differ this time around.

The big thing I remembered about it is that the male lead is a total shit who starts out the movie intending to kill his wife (before he has a change of heart) and ends it intending to kill his mistress (before he’s interrupted). I’d actually forgotten the full extent of his violence, in that there’s a scene in the middle where he also threatens to kill a dude who was hitting on his wife, stabbing at him with a pocket knife.

But while I remembered the big character beats, I didn’t remember how visually impressive the movie is. The bucolic village; the foggy, sinister lakeshore; the bustling modern city; the hyperkinetic, futuristic amusement park — it’s just incredible in establishing these locations, and the way Murnau moves the camera around feels noticeably dynamic compared to the static compositions that are more common in movies of this vintage.

And once you move past the of-its-time blithe acceptance of all that misogynistic violence, the movie’s effective in establishing its tone — the tension as the man nerves himself up to kill his wife in the early scenes, the chill date-night vibe in the middle (including the unforgettable piglet slide scene), and the frantic tension of the shipwreck at the end.

Back in 2016, I apparently hated this movie. Its virtues were largely invisible to me, while its enthusiastic domestic violence stood out obtrusively. I suspect that having more context helps me understand how impressive this movie is — back then, this was literally the first silent movie I ever watched. In addition to letting me contextualize its artistic qualities better, having seen a bunch of old movies has made me more chill about the reality that they were inevitably products of terrible societies, and able to accept them on their own terms.

So yeah, I think past-me was mostly wrong, and this is a legitimately good movie, one that easily deserves its place on both lists (but which I still wouldn’t put into a top ten, so very reasonable slide out of it in 2022). But I can also say that even if you have been marinating in old movies, this one is still notable for its domestic violence.