One of Lang's most macabre and feverish films, this baroque thriller
centres on a Hitchcockian "exchange of guilt" as a murder
committed by the anti-hero leads his protective brother first to
incriminate himself by helping to dispose of the corpse, and finally to
become prime suspect. Most haunting, however, is Lang's melodramatic
visualisation of the real culprit's growing madness, at its height in
the superb scene on the river as he searches pathetically for the body
which the tide has drawn back up from the sea.
